Selected stories & observations from the great American writer & Pulitzer Prize-winning author John UpdikeJohn Updike was one of the greatest American writers of his generation. In a career spanning half a century, he wrote over 50 books chronicling middle-class white America in the postwar years, and its changing attitudes to sex, divorce and religion. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won th...

**“A lacerating story of loss and of seeking, written in prose that is charged with emotion but is always held under impeccable control.”—***Kansas City StarRabbit, Run* is the book thatestablished 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 who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between ...

“John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [is one of his] most ambitious works. . . . [A] comedy of the blackest sort.”—The New York Times Book ReviewToward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snug little Rhode Island seacoast town, wonderful powers have descended upon Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie, bewitching divorcées with sudden access to all that is female, fecund, and mysterious. Alexandra, a sculpt...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • The arc of literary giant John Updike’s life emerges in these luminous daily letters to family, friends, editors, and lovers—a remarkable outpouring over six decades, from his earliest consciousness as a writer to his final days.As James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually “express himself in written form as copiously and as elegantly as any American writer” b...

**From one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century—and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series: “A chilling tale that is perhaps the most essential novel to emerge from September 11” (People) about an eighteen-year-old devoted to Allah, who’s convinced he’s discovered God’s purpose for him.“The most satisfactory elements in Terrorist are those that remind us that no amount of special pleading can set us free of history, no matter how oblivio...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century brings back ex-basketball player Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the late middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, who has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild, and is looking for reasons to live.“Brilliant . . . the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time.”—The Washington Post Book World...

“Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—TimeOne of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsOne of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a ...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, returns—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century.The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the Pr...

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 Conant and Sally Mathias are in love and want to get married, though they already are married to others. A diadem of five symmetrical chapters describes the course of their affair as it flickers off and on, and as their spouses react, in a tentative late-summer atmosphere of almost-last ...

Gertrude and Claudius are the “villains” of Hamlet: he the killer of Hamlet’s father and usurper of the Danish throne, she his lusty consort, who marries Claudius before her late husband’s body is cold. But in this imaginative “prequel” to the play, John Updike makes a case for the royal couple that Shakespeare only hinted at. Gertrude and Claudius are seen afresh against a background of fond intentions and family dysfunction, on a stage darkened by the ominous shadow of a sullen,...

A delightful, witty, passionate novel that follows its hero from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century—from a master of American letters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.John Updike’s twenty-first novel, a bildungsroman, follows Owen Mackenzie from his birth in the semi-rural Pennsylvania town of Willow to his retirement in the rather geriatric community of Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts....

An antic riff on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, in which a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.“Updike may be America’s finest novelist and [this] is quintessential Updike.”—The Washington PostAt a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual ren...