Novelist John Updike dies aged 76

John Updike, the American novelist, short-story writer and poet, died this morning aged 76. His death was announced in a short statement by Nicholas Latimer, his publisher at Alfred A. Knopf. "It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer. He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed."

Updike, considered one of the biggest noises in post-war American fiction, wrote more than 50 books in a career that began in the 1950s. While he is best known for his 'Rabbit' novels, which set the undistinguished life of a middle-American called Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom against the background of the last half-century's major events, he is most recognised as the "chronicler of suburban adultery" par excellence. ("A subject which," he once wrote, "if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me.").

He was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it "to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached".

However, he often slipped away from familiar territory. The Witches of Eastwick, which was later made into a Hollywood movie starring Jack Nicholson, Cher and Susan Sarandon, concerned a New England coven of divorcees. The Coup concerned a fictional Cold War-era African dictatorship. Both became bestsellers.

Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest won him two Pulitzer Prizes, making him the only person to achieve this feat in one category. Yet novel-writing was not his first choice of career. After graduating from Harvard, he pursued a career as graphic artist: he had hopes to be an animator for Disney and went on to attend the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, called him the “the great middle American novelist”. He said tonight: “He wrote about more subjects more brilliantly than anyone else.” The ‘Rabbit’ series, in his view, constitutes the great American novel of the 20th century.

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