John Updike

Rabbit, Run

de John Updike

Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star...

Bech at Bay

de John Updike

In this, the final volume in John Updike’s mock-heroic trilogy about the Jewish American writer Henry Bech, our hero is older but scarcely wiser. Now in his seventies, he remains competitive, lecherous, and...

The Afterlife: And Other Stories

de John Updike

To the hero of the title story of this collection, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: “A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig . . . each reed of thatch, each tiny daisy...

Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf

de John Updike

John Updike wrote about the lure of golf for five decades, from the first time he teed off at the age of twenty-five until his final rounds at the age of seventy-six. Golf Dreams collects the most memorable...

Toward the End of Time: A Novel

de John Updike

Set in the near future of 2020, this disconcerting philosophical fantasy depicts an America devastated by a war with China that has left its populace decimated, its government a shambles, and its natural resources...

Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism

de John Updike

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection...

Picked-Up Pieces: Essays

de John Updike

In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one...

Terrorist: A Novel

de John Updike

The terrorist of John Updike’s title is eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three. Devoted to Allah and to the Qur’an...

Buchanan Dying: A Play

de John Updike

To the list of John Updike’s well-intentioned protagonists—Rabbit Angstrom, George Caldwell, Piet Hanema, Henry Bech—add James Buchanan, seen above as a young Congressman in the 1820’s, and on the front...

The Maples Stories

de John Updike

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Collected together for the first time in hardcover, these eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage...

In the Beauty of the Lilies: A Novel

de John Updike

In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds...

Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

de John Updike

To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw...

Memories of the Ford Administration: A Novel

de John Updike

When historian Alfred “Alf” Clayton is invited by an academic journal to record his impressions of the Gerald R. Ford Administration (1974–77), he recalls not the political events of the time but rather...

Assorted Prose

de John Updike

John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens...

Trust Me: Short Stories

de John Updike

The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all. Love pangs,...

Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories

de John Updike

“The Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage,” writes the author in his Foreword, a marriage that is threatened early on by the temptations of infidelity (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”)...

Marry Me: A Romance

de John Updike

Marry Me is subtitled “A Romance” because, in the author’s words, “people don’t act like that anymore.” The time is 1962, and the place is a fiefdom of Camelot called Greenwood, Connecticut. Jerry...

The Same Door: Short Stories

de John Updike

The title of John Updike’s first short story collection, published when the author was twenty-seven, alludes to the old superstition that you should enter and leave a house by the same door. Thus John Nordholm,...

Problems: And Other Stories

de John Updike

In this midcareer collection of twenty-three short stories, John Updike tackles such problems as separation, divorce, and remarriage, parents and children, guns and prostitution, leprosy, swooning, suffocation,...

Pigeon Feathers: And Other Stories

de John Updike

When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American...