Looking at Mr. Updike's influences, critic Louis Menand pointed out three in particular. Ernest Hemingway taught Mr. Updike and many other young fiction writers "the importance of suppressing information, and the use of dialogue to convey significance," Mr. Menand wrote in a 2003 article for the New Yorker.
Another influence, Vladimir Nabokov, modeled "almost religious commitment to linguistic hyper-clarity." And there was James Joyce. "Everywhere you find the eucharistic metaphor that was at the heart of Joyce's aesthetics," Mr. Menand wrote.
Most of Mr. Updike's short stories appeared first in the New Yorker, where he was briefly a staff writer and, for decades, a regular contributor.
John Hoyer Updike was born in Shillington, a suburb of Reading, Pa., on March 18, 1932. He was a gawky, sickly child who had a stammer, asthma and psoriasis, which he describes in meticulous detail in Self-Consciousness. Through high school, he was more interested in drawing and painting than in writing. He attended Harvard University, where he was a cartoonist for the Harvard Lampoon. He also took creative-writing classes and wrote short stories, light verse and essays. By the time he graduated, summa cum laude, he had decided to be a professional writer.
He married Mary Pennington in 1953. The marriage ended in divorce in 1976. A year later, he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard. Survivors include his wife and three stepchildren; four children from his first marriage; and several grandchildren.
In 2004, he said he was ready to slow his pace, but that he would not stop writing. "Writing makes you more human," he said.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels
The Poorhouse Fair, 1959
Rabbit, Run, 1960
The Centaur, 1963
Of the Farm, 1965
Couples, 1968
Bech, a Book, 1970
Rabbit, Redux, 1971
A Month of Sundays, 1975
Marry Me, 1977
The Coup, 1978
Rabbit is Rich, 1981
Bech is Back, 1982
The Witches of Eastwick, 1984
Roger's Version, 1986
S., 1988
Rabbit At Rest, 1990
Memories of the Ford Administration, 1992
Brazil, 1994
In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996
Toward the End of Time, 1997
Bech At Bay, 1998
Gertrude and Claudius, 2000
Seek My Face, 2002
Villages, 2004
Terrorist, 2006
The Widows of Eastwick, 2008
Short Stories
"The Same Door," 1959
"A&P," 1961
"Pigeon Feathers," 1962
"The Music School," 1966
"Museums And Women," 1972
"Problems," 1979
"Trust Me," 1987
"The Afterlife," 1994
"My Father's Tears and Other Stories," 2009
Poetry
"Ex-Basketball Player," 1957
"Telephone Poles," 1963
"Tossing and Turning," 1977
"Facing Nature," 1985
Collected Poems: 1953-1993, 1993
Americana: and Other Poems, 2001
Nonfiction
Assorted Prose, 1965
Self-Consciousness, 1989
Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf, 1996
Still Looking: Essays on American Art, 2005
Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, 2007
