John Updike

Updike grew up in Shillington, Pennsylvania, the only child of a schoolteacher father, in a household strained by his mother's own literary ambitions. A scholarship took him to Harvard and then, briefly, to art school in Oxford before he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in his early twenties, publishing there for over five decades.

He wrote at a punishing pace (dozens of novels, story collections, poetry, and criticism) while returning every decade to Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, whose four novels won him two Pulitzer Prizes. His lifelong psoriasis, a source of private shame, surfaces repeatedly in his fiction's preoccupation with skin, flesh, and bodily embarrassment.

He settled for decades in Ipswich, Massachusetts, chronicling suburban adultery partly drawn from his own; he died of lung cancer in 2009, having published a novel or story collection almost every year of his adult life.