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}} John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels ''Rabbit, Run''; ''Rabbit Redux''; ''Rabbit Is Rich''; ''Rabbit at Rest''; and the novella ''Rabbit Remembered''), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both ''Rabbit Is Rich'' (1982) and ''Rabbit at Rest'' (1990) were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner). He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in ''The New Yorker'' starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for ''The New York Review of Books''. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike was well recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolificacy. He wrote on average a book a year. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity."〔.〕 His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans; its emphasis on Christian theology; and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted a significant amount of critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice" that extravagantly describes the physical world, while remaining squarely in the realist tradition.〔.〕 He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due."〔.〕 ==Early life and education== Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised in the nearby small town of Shillington.〔("John Updike Biography" ). Academy of Achievement. Retrieved 30 January 2010.〕 The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike. "One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is of seeing her at her desk... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in." These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories.〔 Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and attended Harvard with a full scholarship. At Harvard, he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to the ''Harvard Lampoon'', of which he served as president. He graduated ''summa cum laude'' in 1954 with a degree in English.〔Boswell, Marshall. ("John Updike" ), ''The Literary Encyclopedia'', March 18, 2004〕 Upon graduation, Updike attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist.〔.〕 After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to ''The New Yorker''. This was the beginning of his professional writing career.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「John Updike」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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