The IAFOR Paper Archive recently uploaded “John Updike and the Grandeur of American Suburban Life,” a critical study by Oliver Hadingham, Rikkyo University, Japan presented at the 2016 Asian Conference on Literature, Librarianship & Archival Science.
Abstract:
The standing of John Updike (1932-2009), a multiple prize-winning author of more than 60 books, has suffered over the last two decades. Updike’s great subject was ordinary middle class America. He strove to illuminate the truths of small town America, to reveal the beauty in its ordinariness. Updike captures the texture of ordinary American life and the way sex and religion frame modern American existence, and the path of America itself, from the cozy Eisenhower era to the uncertainties and exhaustion of the early 21st century. Updike mission was to articulate something serious and empowering to the ordinary reader – the truths and texture of America itself.