Bob Batchelor’s “John Updike: A Critical Biography,” which will be published by Praeger on April 30, 2013, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.

Here’s the description of the hardcover (226-page) book:

Widely considered “America’s Man of Letters,” John Updike is a prolific novelist and critic with an unprecedented range of work across more than 50 years. No writer has ever written from the variety of vantages or spanned topics like Updike did. Despite being widely recognized as one of the nation’s literary greats, scholars have largely ignored Updike’s vast catalog of work outside the Rabbit tetralogy. This work provides the first detailed examination of Updike’s body of criticism, poetry, and journalism.

Examining Updike’s criticism and journalism, popular culture scholar Bob Batchelor shows how that work played a central role in transforming his novels. The book disputes the common misperception of Updike as merely a chronicler of suburban, middle-class America by focusing on his novels and stories that explore the wider world, from the groundbreaking The Coup (1978)  to Terrorist (2006). John Updike: A Critical Analysis asks readers to reassess Updike’s career by tracing his transformation over half a century of writing.