January 27, 2009

Updike at Rest

Legendary novelist, essayist, and critic John Updike died today. From his acclaimed Rabbit novels to The Witches of Eastwick to his work for The New Yorker, he touched several generations of readers with what Martin Amis calls "prose that is always fresh, nubile and unwitherable."

Updike recently wrote an introduction for a National Geographic piece about bizarre dinosaurs; in October he talked Presidential book recommendations with the Guardian; in 1997 he waxed unsentimental about his own body of work for The New Yorker; in 1967 he wrote a poem inspired by an issue of Scientific American. Rabbit At Rest, his fourth and final installment of the Harry Angstrom chronicles, won the Pulitzer Prize.

He will be missed.

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