Updike is internationally known for his novels Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. They follow the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a star athlete, from his youth through the social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s, to later periods of his life, and to final decline. Updike's oeuvre has been large, consisting of novels, collections of poems, short stories, and essays. His most recent work, Terrorist, reports on the idea of “home grown terror.” He has written much criticism. Among the writers whose works he has reviewed are such names as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Iris Murdoch, Michael Tournier, Raymond Queneau, Umberto Eco, Milan Kundera, Evgenii Evtushenko, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Isabel Allende.

John Updike was born in Shillington, a small town in Pennsylvania, the model of his fictional towns of Olinger and Brewer. Updike's childhood was shadowed by psoriasis and stammering, but his mother encouraged him to write. In his childhood he lived in an isolated farm, from where he dreamed to escape. He consumed books by Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and P. G. Wodehouse. "My inability to read bravely as a boy had this advantage: when I went to college, I was a true tabula rasa, and received gratefully the imprint of my instructors' opinion, and got good marks." (from New York Times, July 4, 1965).

After high school in Shillington, where his father worked as a science teacher, Updike attended Harvard. He majored in English in 1954, and contributed to and later edited the Harvard Lampoon. He spent the academic year 1954-1955 at Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England. In 1955 he joined The New Yorker staff, writing editorials, poetry, stories, and criticism.

In 1957 Updike left the magazine and became a full time writer. He moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for seventeen years. It became the model for Tarbox in his novel Couples, the portrait of sexual passion and realignment amongst a group of young suburban married couples. His first book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, a collection of poetry, appeared in 1958. Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959), was about the residents of an old people's home. The Centaur (1963) used a mythological framework to explore the relationship of a schoolmaster father and his son. The Coup (1979) was an exotic first-person narration by an ex-dictator of a fictitious African state. Updike's prequel to Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius, in which the moody prince is not the central character but the story focuses on his mother Queen Gertrude, her husband, and Claudius, her husband's younger brother, appeared in 2000. His latest novel is Villages (2004), revolving around an elderly man’s reminiscences of his relationships with the women in his life.

Updike has received several awards, among them Guggenheim Fellow (1959), Rosenthal Award, National Institute of Arts and Letters (1959), National Book Award in Fiction (1964), O. Henry Prize (1967-68), American Book Award (1982), National Book Critics Circle Award, for fiction (1982, 1990), Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award (1982), National Arts Club Medal of Honor (1984); National Medal of the Arts (1989); PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2004). In 1976 he became a member of American Academy of Arts and Letters. Updike's novels Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest won Pulitzer Prices. After Updike laid Rabbit Angstrom to rest, his alter ego, Jewish American novelist Harry Bech, is still on the literary scene.

[Davidson Distinguished Lecture Series]