Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of March 18th
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It is the 77th day of the year, leaving 288 days remaining in 2022.
Updike wrote erudite novels about small-town America, focusing on the problems of its unremarkable residents. In those books, he wrote about religion, responsibility and identity, sex and sensuality, and death.
He examined the sorrows, frustrations, and banalities of American life, but was criticized for his misogynistic description of women.
He was praised for a rich, descriptive style, using polished yet dense language, but criticized for using that language to distance himself from the reader.
In his novels would often fixate on a person's thoughts and actions as he went through various phases of life. He would return again and again to different characters at different times, and sometimes would place a previously main character in a secondary role in a subsequent book.
He is one of only four writers to have won the Pulitzer prize for fiction twice, and he won it both times for novels about an oft-examined character, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. He introduced the character in Rabbit Run, portraying him as a star high school basketball player so unsatisfied with his mundane, middle-class, suburban lifestyle that he runs away.
Updike returned to Rabbit several times, using him to comment on changes in Amercian life during the second half of the 20th Century. In all, he write four novels and one novella about Rabbit, with two of them, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, winning the Pulitzer.
Overall, he wrote more than 20 novels. He also wrote short stories, poems, and books of literary and art criticism.
Updike died in 2009.
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