Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of John Updike.

Collects thirty-two interviews with the writer between 1959 and 1993.

After traveling the world to exotic lands, Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie -- now widowed but still witches -- return to the Rhode Island seaside town of Eastwick, "the scene of their primes," site of their enchanted mischief more than three decades ago. Diabolical Darryl Van Horne is gone, and what was once a center of license and liberation is now a "haven of wholesomeness" populated by hockey moms and househusbands acting out against the old ways of their own absent, experimenting parents. With spirits still willing but flesh weaker, the three women must confront a powerful new counterspell of conformity. In this wicked and wonderful novel, John Updike is as his very best - a legendary mster of literary magic up to his old delightful tricks.

John Updike is one of the most seminal American writers of the 20th century and one of the most prolific as well. In addition to his best-selling novels, he has written numerous poems, short stories, reviews, and essays. His writing consistently reveals stylistic brilliance, and through his engagement with America's moral and spiritual problems, his works chronicle America's hopes and dreams, failures and disappointments. Though he is an enormously popular writer, the complexity and elegance of his works have elicited growing scholarly attention. Through several hundred alphabetically arranged entries, this book provides both casual and serious readers an exceptional guide to his life and writings. Whether the reader is seeking a novel summary, an authoritative analysis of subjects, elucidation of an allusion, or a point about Updike's life or manner of composition, the encyclopedia is indispensable. A chronology summarizes the major events in Updike's career, while an introductory essay examines his progress as a writer, from his crafted light verse and informed reviews to his innovative novels and stories. The entries that follow summarize Updike's books, describe all major characters, explain allusions, identify major images and symbols, analyze principal subjects, discuss his life and career, and draw on the most significant scholarship. Entries include bibliographies, and the volume closes with a list of works for further reading.

John Updike is one of the most prolific and important American authors of the contemporary period, with an acclaimed body of work that spans half a century and is inspired by everything from American exceptionalism to American popular culture. This Companion joins together a distinguished international team of contributors to address both the major themes in Updike's writing as well as the sources of controversy that Updike's writing has often provoked. It traces the ways in which historical and cultural changes in the second half of the twentieth century have shaped not just Updike's reassessment of America's heritage, but his reassessment of the literary devices by which that legacy is best portrayed. With a chronology and bibliography of Updike's published writings, this is the only guide students and scholars of Updike will need to understand this extraordinary writer.

Presents a look at the work, career, and literary reputation of John Updike. By the age of twenty-eight, John Updike had already been published in the three major forms - novel, poem, and short story. For the next four decades his literary career would realize itself primarily in these forms. This book offers a portrait of the writer and his work.

Presenting the first interdisciplinary consideration of his political thought, Updike and Politics: New Considerations establishes a new scholarly foundation for assessing one of the most recognized and significant American writers of the post-1945 period. This book brings together a diverse group of American and international scholars, including contributors from Japan, India, Israel, and Europe. Like Updike himself, the collection canvases a wide range of topics, including Updike’s too often overlooked poetry and his single play. Its essays deal with not only political themes such as the traditional aspects of power, rights, equality, justice, or violence but also the more divisive elements in Updike’s work like race, gender, imperialism, hegemony, and technology. Ultimately, the book reveals how Updike’s immense body of work illuminates the central political questions and problems that troubled American culture during the second half of the twentieth century as well as the opening decade of the new millennium.

The Jewish American novelist Henry Bech—procrastinating, libidinous, and tart-tongued, his reputation growing while his powers decline—made his first appearance in 1965, in John Updike’s “The Bulgarian Poetess.” That story won the O. Henry First Prize, and it and the six Bech adventures that followed make up this collection. “Bech is the writer in me,” Updike once said, “creaking but lusty, battered but undiscourageable, fed on the blood of ink and the bread of white paper.” As he trots the globe, promotes himself, and lurches from one woman’s bed to another’s, Bech views life with a blend of wonder and cynicism that will make followers of the lit-biz smile with delight and wince in recognition.

When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels—the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life. Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century; and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. He has given us our representative American story. This Rabbit Angstrom volume is composed of the following novels: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.

One of the world's greatest writers, John Updike chronicled America for more than five decades. This book examines the essence of Updike's writing, propelling our understanding of his award-winning fiction, prose, and poetry. Widely considered "America's Man of Letters," John Updike is a prolific novelist and critic with an unprecedented range of work across more than 50 years. No author has ever written from the variety of vantages or spanned topics like Updike did. Despite being widely recognized as one of the nation's literary greats, scholars have largely ignored Updike's vast catalog of work outside the Rabbit tetralogy. This work provides the first detailed examination of Updike's body of criticism, poetry, and journalism, and shows how that work played a central role in transforming his novels. The book disputes the common misperception of Updike as merely a chronicler of suburban, middle-class America by focusing on his novels and stories that explore the wider world, from the groundbreaking The Coup (1978) to Terrorist (2006). Popular culture scholar Bob Batchelor asks readers to reassess Updike's career by tracing his transformation over half a century of writing.