In “How John Updike Died and Got Better,” an essay that’s both artful and thoughtful, Alexander Sorondo wrote, “John Updike wrote and published constantly for 40 years. More than 70 titles. Thousands of articles. Mostly for The New Yorker. He sold millions of books and his Rabbit Angstrom quartet is celebrated as a pillar of American literary achievement in the 20th century. . . . Couples was a hit. It earned him $1 million if you include the $400,000 movie rights. . . . It got him on the cover of Time magazine. He was on there again in 1982 when Rabbit Is Rich won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Ten years later he published a sequel and they gave him another Pulitzer for it (only the third American to ever win it twice). Then a PEN/Faulkner Award after that and he got a Guggenheim too at some point. He appeared multiple times on Dick Cavett and Charlie Rose and he was the subject of documentaries and biographies and critical anthologies and an academic periodical that endures to this day.
“He died in 2009.
“And then everyone stopped reading him.
“I think they’ll start again,” Sorondo wrote.