Writer John Updike Dies (Photos)

John Updike, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction has died at the age of 76. Read more on writer John Updike’s death below.

John Updike, a long-time resident of Beverly Farms, died of lung cancer at Hospice of the North Shore in Danvers, according to his wife, Martha.

John Updike was a novelist, short story writer, critic, and poet. Updike always strove to produce a book per year. The first was a collection of poems, “The Carpentered Hen” (1958). “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories” is scheduled to be published in June.

“It’s always a push to get up the stairs, to sit down and go to work,” he told Time magazine in 1982. “You’d rather do almost anything, read the paper again, write some letters, play with your old dust jackets, any number of things you’d rather do than tackle that empty page, because what you do on the page is you, your ticket to all the good luck you’ve enjoyed.”

“When I write,” Mr. Updike once noted, “I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.”

Another concern (unto obsession) was sex. Mr. Updike told Time in a 1968 cover story that when his wife read his then-scandalous novel “Couples” (1968) “she felt that she was being smothered in pubic hair.” Adultery looms as large in Mr. Updike’s fiction as paranoia does in Thomas Pynchon’s or hunting and fishing in Ernest Hemingway’s. “Sex is like money,” he once wrote; “only too much is enough.”

John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pa., which he would recast in his early short stories as Olinger. His parents were Linda Grace (Hoyer) Updike and Wesley Updike. Mr. Updike would lovingly portray his father, who taught junior high school mathematics, as the teacher in his National Book Award-winning novel, “The Centaur” (1963).

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Updike’s mother encouraged her son to write and draw. While acknowledging the effect of her influence, he saw at least two other factors in his becoming a writer.

“I’m sure,” Mr. Updike said in a 1978 Newsday interview, “that my capacity to fantasize and make coherent fantasies, to have the patience to sit down day after day and to whittle a fantasy out of paper, all that relates to being an only child.”

And in “Self-Consciousness” he wrote: “My assets as a novelist I take to be the taste for American life acquired in Shillington, a certain indignation and independence also acquired there, a willingness to suspend judgment, and a cartoonist’s ability to compose within a prescribed space.”

Updike was president of his high school class, editor of the school paper, and won a scholarship to Harvard. Updike excelled at Harvard as well, graduating summa cum laude in English and won a fellowship to study abroad.

While in college, Mr. Updike married Mary Pennington. They divorced in 1977. The couple spent a year living in England, where Mr. Updike was studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing, at Oxford.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Updike leaves behind two sons, David of Cambridge; Michael, of Newburyport; two daughters, Miranda, of Ipswich, and Elizabeth, of Maynard; three stepsons, John Bernhard, of Lexington, Jason Bernhard, of New York City, and Frederic Bernhard, of New Canaan, Conn.; seven grandchildren; and seven step-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

Our condolences to friends of family of John Updike.

Images: pr

Source: news

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