John Updike wasn’t only one of America’s greatest writers; he was also among the most prolific, averaging a book a year during his long career. So it’s more than a little surprising to see his name turn up on a list of “Authors who have made us wait for their books,” which was recently published in the Life & Style section of The Times of India.

But the concept is this:  the gap between an original book and a sequel.

“Author John Updike took a gap of 24 years between his books The Witches of Eastwick (1984) and The Widows of Eastwick. Updike revisited the witches more than two decades later to wrap their story up before he died less than a year later in 2009. He explained why he wrote the sequel: ‘Taking those women into old age would be a way of writing about old age, my old age.'” (Photo credit: Wikipedia).