Updike

<p><em>Updike</em> is Adam Begley's masterful much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike--a candid intimate and richly detailed look at his life and work.</p><p>In this magisterial biography Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike the acclaimed novelist poet short-story writer and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing middleness with all its grits bumps and anonymities.</p><p><em>Updike</em> explores the stages of the writer's pilgrim's progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief busy working life as the golden boy at <em>The New Yorker</em>; his family years in suburban Ipswich Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town Beverly Farms where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer's colleagues friends and family Begley explores how Updike's fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life--including his enduring religious faith his two marriages and his first-hand experience of the adulterous society he was credited with exposing in the bestselling <em>Couples</em>.</p><p>With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis Begley probes Updike's best-loved works--from <em>Pigeon Feathers</em> to <em>The Witches of Eastwick</em> to the <em>Rabbit</em> tetralogy--and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. <em>Updike</em> offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else's.</p>