Rabbit is gone: writer John Updike dies

By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) - John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the drama of small-town American life with flowing and vivid prose, wit and a frank eye for sex, died on Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76.

"It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning," said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House. "He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author died in a hospice in Massachusetts, the state where he lived for more than half a century, prolific in his writing of novels, short stories, essays and criticism.

Updike's stories often focused on undercurrents of tension masked by the mundane surface of suburban America, which boomed in 1960s and 1970s as his career was taking off. Ripples of sexual tension were frequent.

An early short story, "A&P," chronicled an adolescent boy's inner turmoil when three bikini-clad teenage girls appeared in the supermarket where he worked.

"It's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach," Updike wrote, "and another thing in the cool of the A&P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor."

Updike's frank focus on sex came before the profound changes in U.S. culture of the late 1960s lifted some of the taboo from the topic. His publisher rewrote portions of his second novel, "Rabbit, Run," before its first printing out of fear of being charged with obscenity.

That novel introduced the fictional hero Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the subject of four Updike novels and a novella over four decades, which won him two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction.

'AMONG THE VERY BEST'

Updike was acclaimed nearly as much for his short stories, poetry and critical essays as for his 28 novels.

More than 800 Updike stories, reviews, poems and articles were published in The New Yorker magazine from 1954 through 2008. Many American readers strongly associated Updike with that publication.

"Even though his literary career transcended any magazine -- he was obviously among the very best writers in the world -- he still loved writing for this weekly magazine, loved being part of an enterprise that he joined when he was so young," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

"He was, for so long, the spirit of The New Yorker and it is very hard to imagine things without him."

William Pritchard, a professor of English at Amherst College who studied and knew Updike, said Updike stood out for his versatility -- writing fiction, nonfiction and verse.

"He stands, for me, at the very top of the practice of being a man of letters," Pritchard said. "Each activity was carried on with great intelligence and wit and love."