Category Archives: Updike in Context

Author: Updike’s Rabbit captured a tipping point in U.S. history

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In “The First Frames of America’s Slow Fade: John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ Novels,” written for The PineBelt News, Mik Davis began, “A key part of American Literature is to frame the common experience of life with the common aspects of culture. Following the destruction of Europe during WWII, the consumerist culture of America was a key component in our ascension to the world’s dominant superpower. It was not merely having everything that had taken root during previous rings of evolution all at once. It was the combination of societal change, technology, and the expansion of cities, workplaces and culture. It is fitting that not all of this rapid growth can impact everyone. In purely Darwinian terms, someone or something must be left behind.”

One such someone was Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who, “like Reading, peaked too soon.” Davis argued, “The work of Updike is not meant to be satirical although it does seek to mirror societal change and honestly weather the alteration and abandonment of social mores. However, it is the friction of two worlds in motion that sets him apart from other writers. To  most, the events that set televisions aglow or the songs on the radio are a mood setter. To Updike, they are the changing frames around the portrait of a family and the community in decline. Not crisis. However, one might say the crisis around the family may be the factor that changes those frames over time from a gilded gold-leaf ornate locally-forged metal to a simple hand-painted orange/red wood where the grain shows through and perhaps the knots as well.”

Updike’s favorite dust jacket designer talks about his own work

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John Updike Society members were fortunate to have heard Knopf graphic designer Chip Kidd speak at the society’s third biennial conference in Shillington-Reading, Pa., which Kidd, like Updike, called home. Since then, he’s been busy. Really busy.

In their introduction to an interview they did with Kidd, Fast Company summarized his productive life:  “Today Kidd is approaching 40 years as Associate Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf (he is perhaps best known for designing the book cover of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park). He’s written two novels, several nonfiction books on graphic design, and in 2025 released his first Marvel graphic novel, The Avengers in the Veracity Trap!”

Since he was Updike’s fellow Berks Countian and favorite designer, of course Updike came up during the course of the interview:

“I grew up in the town next to Shillington, Pennsylvania, the town my father grew up in. John Updike’s father was his math teacher. Alfred A. Knopf published John Updike, and I ended up working on his book covers. At some point, I would say in the late ’80s, I introduced myself to him and I told him this circumstance. He was absolutely delighted. We became fellow Shillington-ites.

“He was very prolific so I worked with him for 25 years. He just really enjoyed that connection and when I published my first monograph with Rizzoli in 2006, he wrote the introduction to it. That was just a thrill and an honor for me. This idea of something coming full circle. It sounds fictional, but it’s not.”

Read the whole interview.

 

Rabbit (and Updike) Reconsidered

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The October 2025 publication of Selected Letters of John Updike has occasioned numerous reviews and reactions, but for Kazuo Robinson and The Metropolitan Review it has sparked more of a series of ruminations on Updike and his works. Insights from the letters lead to more insights.

“Writing to Plowville from amidst exams in drama since Ibsen and late Romantic poets, [Updike] predicts that he will not write ‘unread masterpieces’ and thus consign Mary to poverty, but instead please an audience the way he knows he can with his drawings (which were roughly in the manner of James Thurber). This will be as a humorous writer of some kind, and ‘if I am going to be a humorist, I must get the idea of infinity out of my head — there has never been a humorist who lived in infinity; humor is manipulation of limitations, a series of contrasts of finite objects.’ He would treat the writer’s page as an enclosed world, putting on hold the infinite questions, religious and existential, and working up the laughs from the combination of a few elements,” Robinson wrote.

“Updike was not, of course, to limit himself, either in his seeing, his imaginative journeying, or his learning. His fiction in particular, never satisfied with a ‘few elements,’ takes in much sensory information, his metaphors are sometimes extravagant, and he shows his knowledge of literature, theology, physics, history, music, painting, printing, even cars and golf. And then of course there is his own life, the main subject of the letters . . . .”

Read the entire article

Teacher talks of being starstruck, and falling stars

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In a brief humorous piece that reads like a cocktail party anecdote, Dianne Mcknight-Warren shared “How Dinner With John Updike Ruined My Teaching Career.” 

“When I was in graduate school, I’d lived in the same town as Updike. He had movie star status, but I never saw him. I worked in a restaurant where he drank a Heineken once at the bar and the bartender got his autograph for me: ‘For Diane who waitresses and teaches all at once–John updike.’ And one night when I wasn’t working he came in for dinner and the manager saved me the carbon from his American Express. I could see his signature if I held it up to a light.”

Read the rest of the story about her 1989 Christmas Eve dinner.

Millennials advised to read John Updike

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In “No One Reads John Updike—And Why Millennial Americans Should,” Tom Vondriska writes with the kind of persuasive flourish that is appropriate to an essay about America’s great stylist of the last half of the 20th century.

Contemplating America’s 250th anniversary, Vondriska writes that “only the superannuated medium of the novel can do proper justice to national self reflection. By slowing it down. Moby Dick, Walden (a novel in feel, if not content), Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and On the Road timestamp America across decades and centuries. The time period most resonant for extant Americans in 2026—that is, the decades after the war—has a single literary protagonist whose life traces the arc of the American century and whose story reveals how this country dealt with finding itself at the center of the world. His name is Harry Angstrom and he was created by John Updike, who called him Rabbit.

“No one reads John Updike in 2026” because “Updike does not fit in a basket Americans feel comfortable, in 2026, peering into. His writing is not didactic. There is no moral in tow. His characters are not progressive for the time he writes in (1950-1990, mostly) and certainly not for the present day. He does not rely on postmodern hijinks and stupid tricks to keep the reader engaged. There are no meta-textual, show-offy pyrotechnics.The author does not seek to confuse the readers or make them feel stupid. The characters are not created to be redeemed and if they grow or change, this is incidental. The characters are not created to be liked. There are no wizards, or time travel, or vampires, no strange inter-textual monkey business with trippy dreamlike surrealism transporting the reader to some altered state of confabulated vertigo. But the writing is simply the most flawless prose in the English language in the 20th century. The characters are set loose in the real world, in America, and make their way. The most famous of Updike’s creations and the one whose life tells the greatest literary story about post-1945 America is Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom”

Read the entire essay.

Quote about creativity is traced back to Updike

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Quote Investigator, which tracks down the sources of quotes, was asked, “Exalted activities such as composing a symphony or devising an invention clearly enable the maker to express creativity. Refreshingly, the prominent writer John Updike contended that even quotidian activities allowed for creativity if the doer cared enough to excel. Would you please help me find a citation?”

The reply: “In 1968 Playboy magazine contacted several well-known writers and asked each one to compose a short piece about creativity. The group included John Updike, Arthur Miller, Le Roi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and James T. Farrell. Updike propounded an expansive notion of creativity” and Updike’s tracked-down quote is reproduced. “For one thing, creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity; the ditchdigger, dentist and artist go about their tasks in much the same way, and any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”

That December 1968 Playboy also included responses from Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg,  and William Styron in a round-up titled “Symposium on Creativity.”

Quote Investigator reports that Updike’s complete remarks written for that 1968 Playboy were reprinted in his 1975 non-fiction collection Picked-Up Pieces, which was then quoted by a Los Angeles Times book reviewer . . . “hence, the quotation received a wider circulation.”

Author: Updike anticipated the MAGA movement

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On July 3, 2026, Rashmee Roshan Lall mentioned Updike in This Week, Those Books, which aims to provide “in roughly five minutes, crucial context—from fiction and non-fiction—to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.” The “Big Story” this week was, of course, America’s 250th birthday. Of Updike, Lall writes,

“Considering America’s 250th birthday is supervised by President Donald Trump, it’s worth examining this novel by one of the country’s greatest 20th-century writers. This John Updike novel is a forerunner of MAGA nostalgia for a golden past set in the 1950s. It’s the second book in Updike’s quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Set in the late 1960s, we see a restless Harry. He has moved on from his schooldays as a basketball star of his small Pennsylvanian town of Brewer. Now, he is now a Linotype operator in a local factory. He has a teenage son, a cooling marriage and feels an increasing sense of irritation at the racial and cultural changes underway. He feels that the America he knew is slipping away. Harry is a nice chap in all sorts of ways, but it really does feel like he shares a lot with Trump’s angry, working-class base.”

Choice Quote (from Rabbit Redux): “It’s as if, all these Afro hair bushes and gold earrings and hoopy noise on buses, seeds of some tropical plant sneaked in by the birds were taking over the garden. His garden. Rabbit knows it’s his garden and that’s why he’s put a flag decal on the back window of the Falcon even though Janice says it’s corny and fascist. In the papers you read about these houses in Connecticut where the parents are away in the Bahamas and the kids come in and smash it up for a party. More and more this country is getting like that. As if it just grew here instead of people laying down their lives to build it.”

Read the whole post.

UK Times names ‘Rabbit, Run’ one of America’s Top 25 works of literature

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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.

Author talks about Ipswich, Updike, and her ‘Couples’-inspired novel

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Jenny Jackson is vice president and editorial director of fiction at Alfred A. Knopf, but that’s not her only connection to John Updike. As she wrote in a June 30, 2026 piece in Book Riot, “I grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a seaside town north of Boston famous for three things: beer, clams, and John Updike.

“The celebrated author wrote his biggest books, including the Rabbit novels, while living on East Street, a few blocks from my house. Ipswich is a small town, and Updike was very much a celebrity in the midst, winning every major literary prize, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, and regularly contributing to the New Yorker.

“But he wasn’t a reclusive star; instead, he was enmeshed in the social fabric of the town, playing volleyball with a big gang of friends, parenting his small children alongside a dozen other couples, and conducting messy extramarital affairs with a few of them.”

Jackson said The Shampoo Effect was inspired by Couples and, in fact, asks the question, What would Updike’s steamy 1968 novel be like if it were published today, gossip in an era of cell phones and social media? Read the entire article.

Jackson also wrote a piece for Literary Hub (“Jenny Jackson on the Literary Potential of Gossip”) in which she identified a second , “The second inspiration for The Shampoo Effect came from a less literary (but equally Massachusetts) fixation. In 2007, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady famously had a baby with the actress Bridget Moynahan while dating the supermodel Gisele Bundchen. Brady and Bridget Moynahan were no longer together, and he was with Gisele by the time Bridget realized she was pregnant. It was a tabloid sensation, a love triangle that paid salaries across Us Weekly and Page Six. So, these two gossipy scandals tangled together in my mind to become a novel.” Read the entire article.

Original Magazines places Updike at the forefront of generational change

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In “From Bedtime Stories to Cultural Struggles: Updike’s Domestic Lens,” Original Magazines examines an Updike short story that appeared in The New Yorker, “Should Wizard Hit Mommy?”

The article called Updike’s literary snapshot of a bedtime ritual happening all across America “The Suburban Calm Before the Storm” and “The Story That Keeps Asking Questions.”

“The New Yorker had evolved far beyond its origins as a humor magazine. By the late 1950s, it had become the most prestigious launchpad in American letters—a place where fiction wasn’t decoration but dissection. J.D. Salinger had already used its pages to expose the phoniness beneath polite society. Philip Roth was sharpening his knives. And Updike, still a rising voice, had chosen the most intimate battlefield imaginable: the space between a parent’s authority and a child’s emerging autonomy.

“The magazine knew what it was doing. Sophistication and subversion, wrapped in the same elegant package.”

The article continued, “In Updike’s story, Jack—the father—spins nightly tales for his daughter Jo. The ritual should be simple: father narrates, child listens, sleep follows. But Jo has developed opinions. When Jack’s story about Roger Skunk ends with the creature’s mother insisting he keep his foul smell rather than the roses the wizard gave him, Jo rebels. She wants the wizard to hit the mother. She wants the ending rewritten.

“Jack refuses.

“What follows isn’t violence or melodrama—it’s something more unsettling. A quiet standoff between generations, between the way things have always been done and the way a child thinks they should be. The bedtime story becomes a referendum on authority itself.

“Updike wasn’t writing about skunks and wizards. He was writing about 1959 America, where the next generation was beginning to ask a question their parents found uncomfortable: Why must it be this way?”

The article concluded, “The June 13, 1959 New Yorker didn’t just publish a story about parental authority—it marked the beginning of that authority’s long, slow erosion. Updike’s ‘Should Wizard Hit Mommy?’ remains uncomfortable precisely because it refuses resolution. Jo’s question hangs in the air, unanswered.

“Should the wizard have hit the mommy? Should children obey without understanding? Should tradition survive simply because it’s tradition?

“In 1959, these were bedtime story questions. By 1969, they were revolution.”

Read the whole article.