John Updike Dead at 76

Sad news:

John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels highlighted so vast and protean a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism as to earn him comparisons with Henry James and Edmund Wilson among American men of letters, died today at a hospice outside Boston. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher.

Where James and Wilson focused largely on elite Americans in a European context, Mr. Updike wrote of ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings. His best-known protagonist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, first appears as a former high-school basketball star trapped in a loveless marriage and a sales job he hates. Through the four novels whose titles bear his nickname — “Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” — the author traces the sad life of this undistinguished middle-American against the background of the last half-century’s major events.

Updike wrote beautifully, I always thought, but the stuff I have read of his, which was basically a lot of his short stories, seemed hollow and much ado about nothing. Maybe it was because he was attempting to depict the suburban world his characters inhabited as hollow. Or maybe I just haven't read enough of him. I will soon get to the Rabbit series, I'm sure. But still it is a terrible loss for those who love literature.