The Times (UK) paid tribute to the United States of America’s 250th anniversary by asking critics to name “their favourite American films, books, TV shows, and more, from Star Wars to Campbell’s Soup.”

For the literature category, Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times chief literary critic for Culture & Books, selected John Updike’s Rabbit, Run as one of her 25 best—and that’s over the entire 250-year span of American literature. Here’s what she wrote:

Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

In high school Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was a basketball star. Now 26, he is trapped in the comfortable disappointments of postwar suburbia: a deadening sales job selling MagiPeelers, a marriage to an alcoholic and a nagging sense that life has passed him by. So Rabbit runs, gets lost and ends up returning to his home town to live with a former prostitute. What follows is one of the great American quests for freedom, rendered in prose of extraordinary beauty and precision. Updike brings to ordinary lives the attentiveness once reserved for kings and heroes, finding poetry, desire and spiritual yearning in every detail. He can make the mundane shimmer. The first in a tetralogy chronicling Rabbit’s life across four decades, this begins an unrivalled portrait of postwar America, turning the life of a drifting former basketball star into one of the defining stories of the 20th century.

Updike, whose father once walked a Fourth of July parade dressed as Uncle Sam, as did his hero, Rabbit, this latest honor would have been icing on the USA 250th anniversary cake.