Mr. Updike took this previously unchartered territory and "made it common American ground," wrote Cynthia Ozick in a 2003 essay for the New York Times Book Review.
In addition to his Pulitzers, Mr. Updike also won the American Book Award and the National Book Award for his novel Rabbit is Rich. Mr. Updike was still in his 20s when his second novel, Rabbit, Run, brought him national attention in 1960. Several reviewers immediately saw the book's main character as an icon of his generation.
Three more novels about Angstrom followed: Rabbit Redux in 1971, Rabbit is Rich in 1981 and Rabbit at Rest in 1990. The last two in the series each won a Pulitzer. As Rabbit muddles through the collapse of established sexual mores, the rise of the technological age and the beginnings of globalization, he becomes a "purposely representative" American male, Mr. Updike explained in Self-Consciousness, his 1989 memoir.
Many critics found "a great divide between Updike's exquisite command of prose and ... the apparent no-good vulgar nothing he expended it on," wrote critic Eliot Fremont-Smith about Rabbit in a 1981 article for the Village Voice.
Others saw Rabbit's story as "a subtle expose of the frailty of the American dream," wrote literary critic Donald J. Greiner, a scholar who wrote extensively about Mr. Updike's work.
Mr. Updike said Rabbit is a typical man, weighed down by the pressures and disappointments of adulthood that few men spoke of in his generation.
"I knew I had things to say about it, things I thought, that nobody else was saying," Mr. Updike told Time magazine in 2006.
He got his first inkling of this literary theme as a boy watching his father, Wesley Updike, a teacher. They rode back and forth to school together, and the young Updike listened to his father worry about their old car and the family bills.
"I saw that it's not easy to be an American male," Mr. Updike said in a 2004 interview with the Academy of Achievement, an educational center in Washington.
As a writer, Mr. Updike aimed to "sort out, particularize and extol with the proper dark beauty" those struggles, he wrote in Self-Consciousness.
Starting with his first published collection of short stories, The Same Door, in 1959, Mr. Updike was admired for his "lean and lapidary prose," as critic A.C. Spectorsky described it in the Saturday Review in 1959.
