Many writers achieve fame. John Updike attained something more: As a novelist, short story writer, poet and critic, he conquered the literary world, becoming one of only three authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction not once, but twice.
Updike’s eye for detail emerged during his childhood in Shillington, Pennsylvania, a small town outside of Reading, itself about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia. Shillington was not a place of prominence. It mostly knew the day-to-day, the conversations that play out at work, with family, or with oneself. There, Updike found an emotional frontier that he shaped into stories that spoke to millions around the world. Like many fiction writers, Updike put himself on the page. But probably few have written a memoir that includes footnotes linking the real events to his portrayal of them in his writing.
Not only did he write in many forms, Updike wrote all the time, producing on average a book a year. That didn’t change after he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008. He spent the months before he died writing poems on facing mortality, many of which were published in his collection
Endpoint and Other Poems.
Endpoint and Other Poems.
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