A great American Novelist has passed: John Updike

John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 - January 27 2009

American novelist, short story writer and poet, internationally known for his novels RABBIT, RUN (1960), RABBIT REDUX (1971), RABBIT IS RICH (1981), and RABBIT AT REST (1990). They follow the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a star athlete, from his youth through the social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s, to later periods of his life, and to final decline. Updike's oeuvre has been large, consisting of novels, collections of poems, short stories, and essays.  Yet on many occasions, Updike has slipped away from familiar territory: The Witches of Eastwick (1984, later made into a movie of the same name concerned a New England coven of divorcees, and was a bestseller;

John Updike was born in Reading in Pennsylvania, but until he was 13 he lived in Shillington, a smaller city near Reading, and then he moved away to Plowville, PA. Updike's childhood was shadowed by psoriasis and stammering, but his mother encouraged him to write. In his childhood Updike lived in an isolated farm. Escaping to the world of mystery novels, he consumed books by Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and John Dickson Carr.

 Some of his famous Quotes:

"Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we'll meet some other time. Under the pear trees, in Paradise." Rabbit at Rest

"Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot." The Witches of Eastwick

An Irish temper makes you appreciate Lutherans." Terrorist

Updike passed away this morning after battling lung cancer.

"He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed," said Nicholas Latimer, vice president of publicity at Updike's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.