Novelist John Updike dies aged 76

Fellow novelists, critics and publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have been adding their tributes overnight following the announcement yesterday of the death of John Updike, the American novelist, short story writer and poet. Nicholas Latimer, his publisher at Alfred A. Knopf, announced: "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."

Martin Amis, writing in the Guardian today, said that as a fellow novelist, "Several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself 'How would Updike have done it?' This is a very cold day for literature."

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".

Yet Updike 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.

Amis praises not only his writing style - "one of compulsive and unstoppable vividness and musicality" - but also his productivity. In his Guardian article, he writes: "He said he had four studies in his house so we can imagine him writing a poem in one of his studies before breakfast, then in the next study writing a hundred pages of a novel, then in the afternoon he writes a long and brilliant essay for the New Yorker, and then in the fourth study he blurts out a couple of poems. John Updike must have been possessed of a purer energy than any writer since DH Lawrence."

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, called him the "the great middle American novelist". He said: "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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