John Updike

Twenty-two-year-old Rabbit Angstrom is a salesman in a local department store, father of a preschool-age son, and husband to an alcoholic wife who was his second-best high school sweetheart. The squalor and tragedy of their lives reminds us that salvation is a personal undertaking.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, returns—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century.
The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century brings back ex-basketball player Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the late middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, who has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild, and is looking for reasons to live. 

“Brilliant . . . the best novel about America to come out of America for a very, very long time.”—The...

In this posthumous collection of John Updike's art writings, a companion volume to the acclaimed "Just Looking "(1989) and "Still Looking" (2005), readers are again treated to "remarkably elegant essays" ("Newsday") in which "the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to work until a deep understanding of the art emerges" ("The New York Times Book Review"). " Always Looking "opens with "The Clarity of Things," the Jefferson...

“Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
One of the signature novels of the...

A master of American letters and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series returns with a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick about the three much-loved divorcées—three decades later. 

More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorcées—Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie—have left town, remarried, and become widows....

Tells the story of Claudius and Gertrude, King and Queen of Denmark, before the action of Shakespeare's Hamlet begins. Employing the nomenclature and certain details of the ancient Scandinavian legends that first describe the prince who feigns madness to achieve revenge upon his father's slayer, Updike brings to life Gertrude's girlhood as the daughter of King Rorik, her arranged marriage to the man who becomes King Hamlet, and her middle-aged affair...

From one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century—and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series: “A chilling tale that is perhaps the most essential novel to emerge from September 11” (People) about an eighteen-year-old devoted to Allah, who’s convinced he’s discovered God’s purpose for him. 
“The most satisfactory elements in Terrorist are those that remind...

The title of John Updike’s first short story collection, published when the author was twenty-seven, alludes to the old superstition that you should enter and leave a house by the same door. Thus John Nordholm, the alternately shy and brash hero of the first story here, is also the narrator of the last. Yet there is a sense in which all sixteen of these stories knock at the same door, a door that in “Dentistry and Doubt” swings open,...

John Updike’s fifth collection of poetry faces nature on a number of levels.  An opening section of sonnets touches upon death, aging, and, in a sequence of describing a week in Spain, insomnia and dread.  The poems that follow consider nature in the form of seasons, of planting trees and being buried, of shadow and rain, of pain and accumulation, and of such human diversions as art and travel.  The last poem here, and the longest...