John Updike, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction whose novels and short stories exposed an undercurrent of ambivalence and disappointment in small-town, middle-class America, died yesterday. He was 76.
Mr. Updike's death from lung cancer was announced by Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher. Mr. Updike was a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., but the announcement did not indicate where he died.
In a career spanning half a century, Mr. Updike published more than 50 books, more than 20 of them novels, and countless short stories, as well as collections of poetry. In recent years, he was best known for his art criticism and essays. His last published piece was a review of Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy in the Nov. 3, 2008, issue of New Yorker magazine.
"He had a remarkably wide range of literary interests that was never in my view superficial or casual," Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, told The New York Times yesterday.
By the late 1980s, Mr. Updike had achieved what a Times writer called "the near royal status of the American author-celebrity," but critical views of his fiction were often mixed.
Lorrie Moore, writing in the New York Review of Books in 2003, said Mr. Updike was "quite possibly ... American literature's greatest short-story writer, and arguably our greatest writer." But Harold Bloom, writing years earlier in a collection of essays on Mr. Updike's work, noted that though the novelist was capable of crafting a "beautifully economical narrative," he lacked depth, which Mr. Bloom saw as a requirement of great fiction. He viewed Mr. Updike as "a minor novelist with a major style."
Despite the critical divide, two of Mr. Updike's most memorable fictional characters, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and Henry Bech, became emblems of the displaced American male that fascinated him as a writer. Angstrom, a man he often referred to as his alter-ego, is the disenchanted middle-class drifter in Mr. Updike's four-book "Rabbit" series. Bech is the Jewish-American novelist, breaking away from his cultural roots and immigrant heritage to become a fully assimilated American. Each in his own way reflects Mr. Updike's major themes.
Early in his career, Mr. Updike said that he wrote most often about the world he came from, "the American Protestant small-town middle class," as he described it in a 1966 interview with Life magazine. "It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."
