John Updike - Academy of Achievement

<!doctype html> <html lang="en-US" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#"> <head><script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/bundle-playback.js?v=HxkREWBo" charset="utf-8"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/wombat.js?v=txqj7nKC" charset="utf-8"></script> <script>window.RufflePlayer=window.RufflePlayer||{};window.RufflePlayer.config={"autoplay":"on","unmuteOverlay":"hidden"};</script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/_static/js/ruffle/ruffle.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> __wm.init("https://web.archive.org/web"); __wm.wombat("http://www.achievement.org:80/achiever/john-updike/","20190223071905","https://web.archive.org/","web","/_static/", "1550906345"); </script> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/_static/css/banner-styles.css?v=S1zqJCYt" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/_static/css/iconochive.css?v=3PDvdIFv" />  <meta charset="utf-8"> <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="57x57" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-57x57.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="114x114" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-114x114.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="72x72" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-72x72.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="144x144" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-144x144.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="60x60" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-60x60.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="120x120" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-120x120.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="76x76" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-76x76.png"/> <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="152x152" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/apple-touch-icon-152x152.png"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-196x196.png" sizes="196x196"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-96x96.png" sizes="96x96"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-32x32.png" sizes="32x32"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-16x16.png" sizes="16x16"/> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/favicon-128.png" sizes="128x128"/> <meta name="application-name" content="Academy of Achievement"/> <meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#000000"/> <meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-144x144.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-square70x70logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-70x70.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-square150x150logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-150x150.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-wide310x150logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-310x150.png"/> <meta name="msapplication-square310x310logo" content="http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/favicon/mstile-310x310.png"/> <link href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905cs_/https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro:400,600,400italic,600italic,700,700italic" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> <title>John Updike - Academy of Achievement</title>  <meta name="description" content=""My mother had dreams of being a writer and I used to see her type in the front room. The front room is also where I would go when I was sick so I would sit there and watch her." Novelist, short story writer and poet, John Updike was one of America's premier men of letters. As a boy growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, he suffered from psoriasis and a stammer, ailments that set him apart from his peers. He found solace in writing, and won a scholarship to Harvard, where he edited the Lampoon humor magazine. He sold his first poem and short story to The New Yorker shortly after graduation. He won early fame with his novel Rabbit, Run (1960), and Pulitzer Prizes for two of its sequels, Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), chronicling the life of a middle-class American through the social upheavals of the 1960s and beyond. Rabbit, Run and Couples (1968) both stirred controversy with their forthright depiction of America's changing sexual mores, and established his reputation as a peerless observer of the human complexity behind the facade of ostensibly conventional lives. His fiction, poetry and essays also show a persistent interest in moral and philosophical questions, informed by his lifelong interest in Christian theology. Over the course of his career, he published over 60 books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry, drama, essays, memoirs and literary criticism. The Early Stories, 1953-1975, published in 2004, collected the short fiction from the first two decades of his career. As large a volume as it is, it represents only a small part of his vast contribution to American literature. John Updike was one of very few Americans to be honored with both the National Medal of Arts and the National Medal for the Humanities."/> <link rel="canonical" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-updike/"/> <meta property="og:locale" content="en_US"/> <meta property="og:type" content="article"/> <meta property="og:title" content="John Updike - Academy of Achievement"/> <meta property="og:description" content="<p class="inputTextFirst">"My mother had dreams of being a writer and I used to see her type in the front room. The front room is also where I would go when I was sick so I would sit there and watch her."</p> <p class="inputText">Novelist, short story writer and poet, John Updike was one of America's premier men of letters. As a boy growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, he suffered from psoriasis and a stammer, ailments that set him apart from his peers. He found solace in writing, and won a scholarship to Harvard, where he edited the <i>Lampoon</i> humor magazine. He sold his first poem and short story to <i>The New Yorker</i> shortly after graduation.</p> <p class="inputText">He won early fame with his novel <i>Rabbit, Run</i> (1960), and Pulitzer Prizes for two of its sequels, <i>Rabbit Is Rich</i> (1981) and <i>Rabbit at Rest</i> (1990), chronicling the life of a middle-class American through the social upheavals of the 1960s and beyond. <i>Rabbit, Run</i> and <i>Couples</i> (1968) both stirred controversy with their forthright depiction of America's changing sexual mores, and established his reputation as a peerless observer of the human complexity behind the facade of ostensibly conventional lives. His fiction, poetry and essays also show a persistent interest in moral and philosophical questions, informed by his lifelong interest in Christian theology.</p> <p class="inputText">Over the course of his career, he published over 60 books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry, drama, essays, memoirs and literary criticism. <i>The Early Stories, 1953-1975</i>, published in 2004, collected the short fiction from the first two decades of his career. As large a volume as it is, it represents only a small part of his vast contribution to American literature. John Updike was one of very few Americans to be honored with both the National Medal of Arts and the National Medal for the Humanities.</p>"/> <meta property="og:url" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-updike/"/> <meta property="og:site_name" content="Academy of Achievement"/> <meta property="og:image" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-Feature-Image-2800x1120.jpg"/> <meta property="og:image:width" content="2800"/> <meta property="og:image:height" content="1120"/> <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"/> <meta name="twitter:description" content="<p class="inputTextFirst">"My mother had dreams of being a writer and I used to see her type in the front room. The front room is also where I would go when I was sick so I would sit there and watch her."</p> <p class="inputText">Novelist, short story writer and poet, John Updike was one of America's premier men of letters. As a boy growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, he suffered from psoriasis and a stammer, ailments that set him apart from his peers. He found solace in writing, and won a scholarship to Harvard, where he edited the <i>Lampoon</i> humor magazine. He sold his first poem and short story to <i>The New Yorker</i> shortly after graduation.</p> <p class="inputText">He won early fame with his novel <i>Rabbit, Run</i> (1960), and Pulitzer Prizes for two of its sequels, <i>Rabbit Is Rich</i> (1981) and <i>Rabbit at Rest</i> (1990), chronicling the life of a middle-class American through the social upheavals of the 1960s and beyond. <i>Rabbit, Run</i> and <i>Couples</i> (1968) both stirred controversy with their forthright depiction of America's changing sexual mores, and established his reputation as a peerless observer of the human complexity behind the facade of ostensibly conventional lives. His fiction, poetry and essays also show a persistent interest in moral and philosophical questions, informed by his lifelong interest in Christian theology.</p> <p class="inputText">Over the course of his career, he published over 60 books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry, drama, essays, memoirs and literary criticism. <i>The Early Stories, 1953-1975</i>, published in 2004, collected the short fiction from the first two decades of his career. As large a volume as it is, it represents only a small part of his vast contribution to American literature. John Updike was one of very few Americans to be honored with both the National Medal of Arts and the National Medal for the Humanities.</p>"/> <meta name="twitter:title" content="John Updike - Academy of Achievement"/> <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-Feature-Image-2800x1120.jpg"/> <script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20190223071905\/http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"WebSite","@id":"#website","url":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20190223071905\/http:\/\/www.achievement.org\/","name":"Academy of Achievement","alternateName":"A museum of living history","potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20190223071905\/http:\/\/www.achievement.org\/search\/{search_term_string}","query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}</script> <script 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[(max-width:992px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-Feature-Image-2800x1120-1400x560.jpg"></div> <div class="display--table"> <div class="display--table-cell"> <figcaption class="feature-area__text ratio-container__text container"> <div class="feature-area__text-inner text-white"> <h2 class="serif-8 feature-area__text-subhead back"><a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever">All achievers</a></h2> <h1 class="serif-1 entry-title feature-area__text-headline">John Updike</h1> <h5 class="sans-6 feature-area__blurb">Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction</h5> </div> </figcaption> </div> </div> </figure> </header> </div>  <nav class="in-page-nav row fixedsticky"> <ul class="nav text-xs-center clearfix" role="tablist"> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link active" data-toggle="tab" href="#biography" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Biography">Biography</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#profile" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Profile">Profile</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#interview" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Interview">Interview</a> </li> <li class="nav-item col-xs-3"> <a class="nav-link" data-toggle="tab" href="#gallery" role="tab" data-gtm-category="tab" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever Gallery">Gallery</a> </li> </ul> </nav> <article class="post-3240 achiever type-achiever status-publish has-post-thumbnail hentry careers-author careers-novelist careers-writer"> <div class="entry-content container clearfix">  <div class="tab-content"> <div class="tab-pane fade in active" id="biography" role="tabpanel"> <section class="achiever--biography"> <div class="banner clearfix"> <div class="banner--single clearfix"> <div class="col-lg-8 col-lg-offset-2"> <div class="banner__image__container"> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/what-it-takes/id1025864075?mt=2" target="_blank"> <figure class="ratio-container ratio-container--square bg-black"> <img class="lazyload banner__image" data-src="/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/WhatItTakes_updike-256-190x190.jpg" alt=""/> </figure> </a> </div> <div class="banner__text__container"> <h3 class="serif-3 banner__headline"> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/what-it-takes/id1025864075?mt=2" target="_blank"> Listen to this achiever on <i>What It Takes</i> </a> </h3> <p class="sans-6 banner__text m-b-0"><i>What It Takes</i> is an audio podcast on iTunes produced by the American Academy of Achievement featuring intimate, revealing conversations with influential leaders in the diverse fields of endeavor: music, science and exploration, sports, film, technology, literature, the military and social justice.</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="row"> <header class="editorial-article__header col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 text-xs-center"> <i class="icon-icon_bio text-brand-primary"></i> <h3 class="serif-3 quote-marks">My mother used to have dreams about being a writer and I used to watch her.</h3> </header> </div> <div class="row"> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar clearfix"> <h2 class="serif-3 p-b-1">Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction</h2> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Birth</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> March 18, 1932 </dd> </div> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Death</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> January 27, 2009 </dd> </div> </aside> <article class="editorial-article col-md-8"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p>John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent his first years in nearby Shillington, a small town where his father was a high school science teacher. The area surrounding Reading has provided the setting for many of his stories, with the invented towns of Brewer and Olinger standing in for Reading and Shillington. An only child, Updike and his parents shared a house with his grandparents for much of his childhood. When he was 13, the family moved to his mother’s birthplace, a stone farmhouse on an 80-acre farm near Plowville, 11 miles from Shillington, where he continued to attend school.</p> <figure id="attachment_14984" style="width: 2200px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><noscript><img class="wp-image-14984 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50317392.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-14984 size-full lazyload" alt="Author John Updike sitting with his wife and children. (Photo by Truman Moore//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)" width="2200" height="1460" data-sizes="(max-width: 2200px) 100vw, 2200px" data-srcset="/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50317392.jpg 2200w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50317392-380x252.jpg 380w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50317392-760x504.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50317392.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Author John Updike sitting with his wife Mary and children, September 1966. (Truman Moore/Time Life Pictures)</figcaption></figure> <p>At home, he consumed popular fiction, especially humor and mysteries. His mother, herself an aspiring writer, encouraged him to write and draw. He excelled in school and served as president and co-valedictorian of his graduating class at Shillington High School. For the first three summers after high school, he worked as a copy boy at the <em>Reading Eagle</em> newspaper, eventually producing a number of feature stories for the paper. He received a tuition scholarship to Harvard University, where he majored in English. As an undergraduate, he wrote stories and drew cartoons for the <em>Harvard Lampoon</em> humor magazine, serving as the magazine’s president in his senior year. Before graduating, he married fellow student Mary E. Pennington. He graduated <em>summa cum laude</em> from Harvard in 1954, and in that same year sold a poem and a short story to <em>The New Yorker</em> magazine.</p> <p>Updike and his wife spent the following year in England, where Updike studied at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. While they were in England, their first daughter was born and Updike met the American writers E. B. and Katharine White, editors at <em>The New Yorker</em>, who urged him to seek a job at the magazine. On returning from England, the Updikes settled in Manhattan, where John took a position as a staff writer at <em>The New Yorker</em>. He worked at the magazine for nearly two years, writing editorials, features and reviews, but after the birth of a son in 1957, he decided to move his growing family to the small town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. He continued to contribute to <em>The New Yorker</em> but resolved to support his family by writing full-time, without taking a salaried position. He maintained a lifelong relationship with <em>The New Yorker</em>, where many of his poems, reviews and short stories appeared, but he resided in Massachusetts for the rest of his life.</p> <figure id="attachment_14977" style="width: 1452px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><noscript><img class="wp-image-14977 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50397188.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-14977 size-full lazyload" alt="John Updike juggles apples, and careers, at home in Ipswich, 1966. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)" width="1452" height="2172" data-sizes="(max-width: 1452px) 100vw, 1452px" data-srcset="/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50397188.jpg 1452w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50397188-254x380.jpg 254w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50397188-508x760.jpg 508w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50397188.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">1966: John Updike juggles apples, and careers, at home in Ipswich, Massachusetts. (Time Life Pictures/Getty)</figcaption></figure> <p>Updike’s first book of poetry, <em>The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures</em>, was published by Harper and Brothers in 1958. When the publisher sought changes to the ending of his first novel, <em>The Poorhouse Fair</em>, he moved to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The first novel was well-received, and with support from the Guggenheim Fellowship, Updike undertook a more ambitious novel, <em>Rabbit, Run</em>. The novel introduced one of Updike’s most memorable characters, the small-town athlete, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Knopf feared that his frank description of Rabbit’s sexual adventures could lead to prosecution for obscenity, and made a number of changes to the text. The book was published to widespread acclaim without legal repercussions. The original text was restored for the British edition a few years later, and subsequent American editions of the book have reflected the author’s original intent. Updike’s reputation as a leading author of his generation was established.</p> <p>After the birth of a third child, Updike rented a one-room office above a restaurant in Ipswich, where he wrote for several hours every morning, six days a week, a schedule he adhered to throughout his career. In 1963, he received the National Book Award for his novel <em>The Centaur</em>, inspired by his childhood in Pennsylvania. The following year, at age 32, he became the youngest person ever elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and was invited by the State Department to tour eastern Europe as part of a cultural exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1967, he joined the author Robert Penn Warren and other American writers in signing a letter urging Soviet writers to defend Jewish cultural institutions under attack by the Soviet government.</p> <figure id="attachment_14978" style="width: 1526px" class="wp-caption alignright"><noscript><img class="wp-image-14978 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50644628.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-14978 size-full lazyload" alt="TIME magazine featured Updike on its cover on April 26, 1968. His novel Couples had inspired the magazine's report on "The Adulterous Society." (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)" width="1526" height="2048" data-sizes="(max-width: 1526px) 100vw, 1526px" data-srcset="/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50644628.jpg 1526w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50644628-283x380.jpg 283w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50644628-566x760.jpg 566w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50644628.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text"><em>TIME</em> magazine featured Updike on its cover on April 26, 1968. His novel <em>Couples</em> had inspired the magazine’s report on “The Adulterous Society.” (Time Life Pictures)</figcaption></figure> <p>In 1968, Updike’s novel <em>Couples</em> created a national sensation with its portrayal of the complicated relationships among a set of young married couples in the suburbs. It remained on the bestseller lists for over a year and prompted a <em>Time</em> magazine cover story featuring Updike. In <em>Bech: A Book</em> (1970), Updike introduced a new protagonist, the imaginary novelist Henry Bech, who, like Rabbit Angstrom, was destined to reappear in Updike’s fiction for many years. Rabbit Angstrom reappeared in <em>Rabbit Redux</em> (1971).</p> <p>In the 1970s, Updike continued to travel as a cultural ambassador of the United States, and in 1974 he joined authors John Cheever, Arthur Miller and Richard Wilbur in calling on the Soviet government to cease its persecution of dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Updike separated from his wife Mary in 1974 and moved to Boston, where he taught briefly at Boston University. Two years later, the Updikes were divorced, and in 1977 he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and her three children in Georgetown, Massachusetts.</p> <p><em>Rabbit Is Rich</em>, published in 1981, received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1983 Updike’s other alter ego, Harry Bech, reappeared in <em>Bech Is Back</em>, and Updike was featured in a second <em>Time</em> magazine cover story, “Going Great at 50.” Among his novels of the 1980s and 1990s are a trilogy retelling <em>The Scarlet Letter</em> from the points of view of three different characters, and a prequel to <em>Hamlet</em>, entitled <em>Gertrude and Claudius</em>. In 1991 he received a second Pulitzer Prize for <em>Rabbit at Rest</em>. He was only the third American to win a second Pulitzer Prize in the fiction category.</p> <figure id="attachment_14976" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><noscript><img class="wp-image-14976 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3272461.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-14976 size-full lazyload" alt="John Updike, 1976. (Getty Images)" width="2280" height="1488" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3272461.jpg 2280w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3272461-380x248.jpg 380w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3272461-760x496.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3272461.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">1976: John Updike received numerous honors, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction, the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Arts, and two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction. (Getty)</figcaption></figure> <p>In an autobiographical essay, Updike famously identified sex, art, and religion as “the three great secret things” in human experience. The grandson of a Presbyterian minister (his first father-in-law was also a minister), his writing in all genres has displayed a preoccupation with philosophical questions. A lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian theology, the Jesuit magazine <em>America</em> awarded him its Campion Award in 1997 as a “distinguished Christian person of letters.” He received the National Medal of Art from President George H.W. Bush in 1989, and in 2003 was presented with the National Medal for the Humanities from President George W. Bush. He was one of a very few Americans to receive both of these honors. The same year saw the publication of a comprehensive collection, <em>The Early Stories, 1953-1975</em>.</p> <figure id="attachment_58936" style="width: 1508px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-58936 " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/https://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-bio-wp-chicago_1216_JFR-1.jpg"></noscript><img class="size-full wp-image-58936 lazyload" alt="" width="1508" height="1360" data-sizes="(max-width: 1508px) 100vw, 1508px" data-srcset="/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-bio-wp-chicago_1216_JFR-1.jpg 1508w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-bio-wp-chicago_1216_JFR-1-380x343.jpg 380w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-bio-wp-chicago_1216_JFR-1-760x685.jpg 760w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/https://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-bio-wp-chicago_1216_JFR-1.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Naomi Judd presenting the Golden Plate Award to John Updike at the 2004 International Achievement Summit.</figcaption></figure> <p>John Updike spent his last years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, in the same corner of New England where so much of his fiction is set. His last book was <em>The Widows of Eastwick</em> (2008), a sequel to his 1984 novel, <em>The Witches of Eastwick</em>. Updike succumbed to lung cancer in 2009 at the age of 76.</p> </body></html> <div class="clearfix"> </div> </article> </div> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="profile" role="tabpanel"> <section class="clearfix"> <header class="editorial-article__header"> <figure class="text-xs-center"> <img class="inductee-badge" src="/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/themes/aoa/assets/images/inducted-badge@2x.png" alt="Inducted Badge" width="120" height="120"/> <figcaption class="serif-3 text-brand-primary"> Inducted in 2004 </figcaption> </figure> </header> <div class="row"> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar"> <dl class="clearfix m-b-0"> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Career</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> <div><a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.writer">Writer</a></div> <div><a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.author">Author</a></div> <div><a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/#filter=.novelist">Novelist</a></div> </dd> </div> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Birth</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> March 18, 1932 </dd> </div> <div class="col-xs-12 sidebar--chunk p-b-2"> <dt class="serif-7">Date of Death</dt> <dd class="sans-2"> January 27, 2009 </dd> </div> </dl> </aside> <article class="col-md-8 editorial-article clearfix"> <p class="inputTextFirst">“My mother had dreams of being a writer and I used to see her type in the front room. The front room is also where I would go when I was sick so I would sit there and watch her.”</p> <p class="inputText">Novelist, short story writer and poet, John Updike was one of America’s premier men of letters. As a boy growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania, he suffered from psoriasis and a stammer, ailments that set him apart from his peers. He found solace in writing, and won a scholarship to Harvard, where he edited the <i>Lampoon</i> humor magazine. He sold his first poem and short story to <i>The New Yorker</i> shortly after graduation.</p> <p class="inputText">He won early fame with his novel <i>Rabbit, Run</i> (1960), and Pulitzer Prizes for two of its sequels, <i>Rabbit Is Rich</i> (1981) and <i>Rabbit at Rest</i> (1990), chronicling the life of a middle-class American through the social upheavals of the 1960s and beyond. <i>Rabbit, Run</i> and <i>Couples</i> (1968) both stirred controversy with their forthright depiction of America’s changing sexual mores, and established his reputation as a peerless observer of the human complexity behind the facade of ostensibly conventional lives. His fiction, poetry and essays also show a persistent interest in moral and philosophical questions, informed by his lifelong interest in Christian theology.</p> <p class="inputText">Over the course of his career, he published over 60 books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry, drama, essays, memoirs and literary criticism. <i>The Early Stories, 1953-1975</i>, published in 2004, collected the short fiction from the first two decades of his career. As large a volume as it is, it represents only a small part of his vast contribution to American literature. John Updike was one of very few Americans to be honored with both the National Medal of Arts and the National Medal for the Humanities.</p> </article> </div> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="interview" role="tabpanel"> <section class="clearfix"> <div class="col-md-12 interview-feature-video"> <figure> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/4RBScpkt6IQ?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=3116&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_26_14_16.Still006-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_26_14_16.Still006-760x428.jpg"></div> <div class="video-tag sans-4"> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> <div class="video-tag__text">Watch full interview</div> </div> </div> </figure> </div> <header class="col-md-12 text-xs-center m-b-2"> <i class="icon-icon_bio text-brand-primary"></i> </header> <aside class="col-md-4 sidebar"> <h2 class="serif-3 achiever--biography-subtitle">Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction</h2> <div class="sans-2">Chicago, Illinois</div> <div class="sans-2">June 12, 2004</div> </aside> <article class="editorial-article col-md-8">   <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p><strong>When did you first get the idea of being a writer?</strong></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/i4rWklNz--E?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_06_39_15.Still007-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_06_39_15.Still007-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>My mother had dreams of being a writer, and I used to see her type in the front room. The front room is also where I would go when I was sick, so I would sit there and watch her. Clearly she was making a heroic effort, and the things would go off in brown envelopes to New York, or Philadelphia even, which had the [Saturday Evening<em>] Post</em> in those years, and they would come back. And so, the notion of it being something that was worth trying and could, indeed, be done with a little postage and effort stuck in my head. But my real art interest — my real love — was for visual art, and that was what I was better at. It was considered at first. My mother saw that I got drawing lessons and painting lessons. I took what art the high school offered. I went to Harvard still thinking of myself as some kind of potential cartoonist, and I got on the <em>Harvard Lampoon</em> as a cartoonist actually, not as a writer, but the writing maybe was more my cup of tea. There were some very gifted cartoonists over at the <em>Lampoon</em>. You wouldn’t expect to find too many at Harvard, but actually they were quite good — about three of them. And, I saw that maybe there was a ceiling to my cartooning ability, but I didn’t sense the same ceiling for the writing because I had hardly given it a try. By the time I got out of Harvard I think I was determined or pretty much resolved to becoming a writer if I could.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p><strong>Did you see yourself becoming a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer or both? You wrote poetry as well.</strong></p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/lS29BrbfKOI?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=73&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_08_57_25.Still001-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_08_57_25.Still001-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>I did write a lot of light verse, and even some verse that wasn’t too light. Even I knew there was no living in being a poet, so fiction was the game. The writers I’d admired, a lot of them had written numerous essays like Robert Benchley, and I did do my share of those things when I was younger, sold a few of them. But, I found when I attempted fiction — I took a few writing courses at Harvard — it’s like sort of a horse you don’t know is there, but if you jump on the back there is something under you that begins to move and gallop. So, it’s clearly a wonderful imaginary world that you enter when you begin to write fiction. So I guess my hope was to become a fiction writer. I was prepared to fail. I was prepared to not be able to get things accepted, because I saw that happen to my mother. I knew that not everybody who tried to write actually got published, and in fact that’s kind of a long odds proposition, but I figured I’d give myself five years, and if I couldn’t get into print in five years I should know that I didn’t have what it took. But, as it turned out, I got into print pretty readily.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p><strong>What was the first thing you wrote that was published?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I actually sold a few poems in my teens to marginal magazines. I remember one poem, “The Boy Who Makes the Blackboard Squeak,” meaning the sort of naughty boy who makes the chalk squeak deliberately. I was paid maybe $5 or $10 for it, but my hope was to get into <em>The New Yorker</em> magazine, which began to come into the house when I was about 11 or 12.</p> <figure id="attachment_14975" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><noscript><img class="wp-image-14975 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3200197.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-14975 size-full lazyload" alt="American author and Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike in a youthful portrait, circa 1955. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" width="2280" height="3189" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3200197.jpg 2280w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3200197-272x380.jpg 272w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3200197-543x760.jpg 543w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3200197.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">1955: American author and Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike in a youthful portrait. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure> <p><strong>Could you find <em>The New Yorker</em> in your hometown, Shillington, Pennsylvania?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: No. <em>The New Yorker</em> was not a Berks County thing. There may have been a few subscribers, but the newsstands did not carry it because I used to look for it. But my aunt, who lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was kind of a hip lady — she was my father’s sister — she thought that we, as a benighted provincial household, could use <em>The New Yorker,</em> and I, in fact, did use it. I loved it. I read the cartoons, but then other things too. The whole tone of the magazine was so superior to any other slick magazine, so I was aimed at <em>The New Yorker</em>. My writing career really begins with the day in June of ’54 when we were staying with my wife’s parents in Vermont, and word came up that there was a letter from <em>The New Yorker</em>, and they had taken a poem, and then a little later that summer they took a story. So rightly or wrongly, I felt kind of launched as a writer, a real writer.</p> <p><strong>They hired you not long after that, didn’t they?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I was in Oxford the year after college with my then wife, who had been a Radcliffe girl. At that point she was a pregnant Radcliffe girl — we had a little girl in April. About that same time, Katharine White and her more famous husband, E.B. White, came to visit us in our basement flat. Katharine White was the fiction editor and a woman of great power, one of the founding members of <em>The New Yorker</em> in ’25, and indeed they offered me a job. Or maybe she just told me I could see Shawn, the editor, when I got back to the States. I did, and he offered me a job, and I worked in New York for about two years.</p> <p><strong>What had you published by then? One story and one poem?</strong></p> </body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/2pfJmw44GfA?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=105&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_10_47_27.Still005-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_10_47_27.Still005-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/courage/">Courage</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>That semester I think I placed four or five more stories with them, as well as quite a number of light verse poems. Light verse was in its twilight, but I didn’t know that so I kept scribbling the stuff and they kept running it for a while. So, I was kind of establishing myself as a dependable contributor and they were a paternalistic organization that tried to gather unto itself talented — whatever — writers. And it was funny to want to do that, because really about the only slot they had to offer was to write for “Talk of the Town,” the front section. We moved in, a little family of three into Riverside Drive, and I began to write these stories, and discovered I could do it, and had kind of a good time doing it. You went around in New York and interviewed people who attended Coliseum shows — kitchen appliances or whatever — and I was very good at making something out of almost nothing. But, I thought after two years that maybe I had gone as far as I could with “The Talk of the Town” as an art form, and I felt New York was a kind of unnatural place to live. I had two children at this point, and my wife didn’t have too many friends and wasn’t, I didn’t think, very happy. Well in the ’50s one didn’t think too hard about whether or not your wife was happy, sad to say, but even I could see that, so I said, “Why don’t we quit the job for a while.” I thought they’d take me back if it didn’t work out, and I’ll try to freelance up in New England, so there is where we went. We moved to a small town in New England, and I never had to go back because I was able to support myself.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"> <html><body><p><strong>Did you continue working for <em>The New Yorker</em> long distance? Nowadays we have email and other technology to commute electronically. How did you do it?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Well, the technology then was the U.S. Mail, so everything took a day or two longer, but it was good enough. You could get from north of Boston to New York in a few hours on the train, so I used to go back and write a couple of “Talk” stories. It wasn’t a clean break, but it was kind of a daring thing. I felt that I would be better off in what I thought was real America. In New York everything is stratified. The people I knew were other writers. Although it’s not a major industry it was enough of a local industry that everybody was watching everybody else and I felt like I was being crowded in a way. In a small town you have good odds of being the only writer and people not really taking an interest in what you do, so you are on your own as a person, and that’s how it worked out. I thought it was successful. The children were able to move out of that pressure cooker, and they went to the public schools and there were many amenities. Free parking. All that was available in a small town.</p> <p><strong>There’s an axiom one hears about writing: “Write what you know.” Geographically, it seems, you have more or less kept to that.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I’ve not ventured too far from what I could verify with my own eyes. I’ve tried, of course, in keeping up product, to stretch and get a little out of the American middle class. I’ve written books about Brazil, and a novel located in Africa. But basically it’s true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.</p> <figure id="attachment_14974" style="width: 2280px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><noscript><img class="wp-image-14974 size-full " src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905im_/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-2840854.jpg"></noscript><img class="wp-image-14974 size-full lazyload" alt="Time magazine cover depicts an illustration of author John Updike by Alex Katz with the headline "Going great at 50," October 12, 1982. (Photo by Time Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)" width="2280" height="3017" data-sizes="(max-width: 2280px) 100vw, 2280px" data-srcset="/web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-2840854.jpg 2280w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-2840854-287x380.jpg 287w, /web/20190223071905im_/http://www.achievement.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-2840854-574x760.jpg 574w" data-src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905/http://162.243.3.155/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-2840854.jpg"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">October 12, 1982:<em> Time</em> magazine cover with an illustration of author John Updike. (Time Inc./Time Life Pictures)</figcaption></figure> <p><strong>It’s striking that the books you first gravitated to were mysteries and crime stories, and yet the books that you became well-known for are about the everyday life of ordinary people in ordinary places.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: It is odd. I love mystery novels and I’ve tried to write them. When I was in my teens I began to write a mystery novel and tried to figure out how to plot it. You sort of plot it backwards, you know. You know who did it and then you try to hide that, and I couldn’t really do it. I’m not saying I couldn’t do it if a gun was put to my head, but it felt unnatural and felt like a very minor kind of witnessing. In other words, I was willing to be entertained by others, but I didn’t want to write entertainments myself. I wanted to write books that told everything I knew, that were fully about life in my tame band of it. So quite early I began to try to become a serious writer. It’s a little puzzling. I’ve written some science fiction. That may not be well-known, but a couple of my novels are located in a hypothetical future. There is something about it that frees you up in a way. Your attempt is always to write about the world you know, but also to somehow get out of it, if only by a little jump or a trick. Something must be different so that your imagination is really engaged. You’re not just spilling your life, but you’re to some extent inventing another life.</p> <p><strong>A lot of us readers feel honored by your paying so much attention to the likes of us, not great adventures but everyday people.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Well, in a democracy in the 20th and 21st century, if you can’t base your fiction upon ordinary people and the issues that engage them, then you are reduced to writing about spectacular unreal people. You know, James Bond or something, and you cook up adventures. The trick about fiction, as I see it, is to make an unadventurous circumstance seem adventurous, to make it excite the reader, either with its truth or with the fact that there’s always a little more that goes on, and there’s multiple levels of reality. As we walk through even a boring day, we see an awful lot and feel an awful lot. To try to say some of that seems more worthy than cooking up thrillers.</p> <p><strong>You said that writing helps the world feel more real to you.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: And I think to the reader, too.</p> </body></html> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/IHgrNkm8VJo?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=66&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_27_10_29.Still003-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_27_10_29.Still003-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/vision/">Vision</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>D.H. Lawrence talks about the purpose of a novel being to extend the reader’s sympathy. And, it is true that upper middle class women can read happily about thugs, about coal miners, about low life, and to some extent they become better people for it because they are entering into these lives that they have never lived and wouldn’t want to lead but nevertheless it is, I think, the sense of possibilities within life. The range of ways to live that in part explains a novel’s value. I mean, in this day and age, so late really in the life of the genre, why do some of us keep writing them and some of us keep reading them? And I think it is, in part, because of that, that it makes you more human. It’s like meeting people at a cocktail party that you had never met and wouldn’t have cared to meet. You wouldn’t have gone out of your way to meet, but suddenly they become real to you. You understand to some extent.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p><strong>You’ve also said that you write to get yourself on paper, to find out more about who you are.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: There is a certain amount of trying to be honest about what it’s like to be an American male of my age and with my general outlook. So, yes, it is a path of self understanding, But…</p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/GqmrNaTu1Jg?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0&end=81&version=3" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_02_17_22.Still009-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_02_17_22.Still009-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/vision/">Vision</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>The fiction that I’m proudest of, insofar as one can discriminate, is that where I have made some leap. I’m best known and been most rewarded really, prize-wise and praise-wise, for the Rabbit books. And Rabbit is — he and I share roughly the same age and the same — born in the same place, but I’ve long left Berks County. He stayed there, and it’s a kind of me that I’m not. I never was a basketball star. I wasn’t handsome the way he is, and nor did I have to undergo the temptations of being an early success that way, so that for me it was a bit of a stretch. Not an immense stretch to imagine what it’s like to be Rabbit, but enough of one that it was entertaining for me to write about him, and maybe some of the self-entertainment got into the book. In other words, you can kind of walk around. I can kind of walk around Rabbit in a way it’s hard to walk around, say, the autobiographical hero of some of your short stories, where it’s your twin, you know, and you’re attached. It’s the idea of breaking that attachment, I think, that matters and where the fiction really begins to take off when you can get somebody else in your sights.</p> </div> </div>      <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p><strong>Did you think you were through with Rabbit after the first novel?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Yeah. I didn’t write that with any idea of a sequel, but the book does kind of end on a hovering note, and enough people asked me, “Well what happened?” Not too many, but a few put a bee in my bonnet. When I had run out of subjects, I thought…</p> </div>     <div class="achiever__video-block"> <figure class="achiever__interview-video"> <div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9"> <iframe class="embed-responsive-item embed-responsive--has-thumbnail" width="200" height="150" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20190223071905if_/https://www.youtube.com/embed/o5BeTwa5GCk?feature=oembed&autohide=1&hd=1&color=white&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&theme=light&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <div class="embed-responsive__thumbnail ratio-container__image lazyload" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_44_10_07.Still011-380x214.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Updike-John-2004-MasterEdit.00_44_10_07.Still011-760x428.jpg"></div> <i class="embed-responsive__play icon-icon_play-full text-brand-primary"></i> </div> <figcaption class="achiever__interview-video-terms"> <span>Keys to success —</span> <a class="comma-item" href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/keys-to-success/the-american-dream/">The American Dream</a> </figcaption> </figure>  <div class="achiever__interview-video__copy"> <p>“Well, why not tell what happened and bring Rabbit back.” This was during the late ’60s, when there was a lot of turmoil in America, and so I brought him back this time as kind of an everyman who is witnessing the pageant of protest and disturbance, distress, drug use, everything, almost everything was in that book, including the moon shot. In fact, the moon shot is kind of a central event in it, so that the Rabbit who came back the second time was a much more purposefully representative American than my initial Rabbit. He was just, you know, a high school athlete who had nowhere much to go after he graduated, whereas the second Rabbit was kind of a growing man trying to learn in a way. I’ve always seen Rabbit, and indeed Americans in general, as learners, as willing to learn. They may be slow to learn, but there is an openness to our mindset that I think enables us to overcome our mistakes or our prejudices and move forward. Certainly the world now is so much more open. I mean, it is easy to be sentimental about the ’30s and ’40s and the wartime solidarity and all that, but there was so much racism, sexism, everything. It was a brutal world compared to the one we’re trying to make now.</p> </div> </div>     <aside class="collapse" id="full-interview">    <div class="achiever__interview-copy"> <p><strong>You could be said to have pioneered the use of the present tense in American fiction. You used it in <em>Rabbit, Run</em>, and in several books since.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Yes. It was a great liberator somehow. I loved writing in the present tense. It has become a bit of a cliché now among younger writers, but at the time it was a bit of a novelty, and certainly a novelty to me. There’s kind of a level, a speed, you can get going without the past tense that was suitable to Rabbit and also suitable to me as a writer, because the books wrote themselves fairly easily. I say that now. I’m not sure it was always easy, but the combination of the present tense plus a landscape that was in my bones, this rural Pennsylvania, semi-rural, metropolitan actually.</p> <p>I always felt at home writing about him, and didn’t have much trouble having things for him to do and the other characters to interact. So I was happy to return the first time, and then having returned for <em>Rabbit Redux</em>, it seemed obligatory on my part to write at least two more. More than four I thought would be milking it unduly. People are mortal. That’s one of the things about them that a fiction writer should be aware of, so I thought even though he was relatively young that I should kill him off while I was still writing well. Suppose I get sick and you’re all left without a Rabbit wrapped up? Hmm. “Rabbit Wrapped Up” would not be a bad title</p> <p>At any rate, I did that and then, since I was alive as it turned out ten years later, I wrote a novella about the two children finding each other and remembering their father and him kind of haunting the book. I wanted him to be there as a ghost, felt as a ghost.</p> <p><strong>Was it hard for you to let him go?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Yeah. I think that’s a good honest way to put it. It was hard for me. Also because he had been so good to me. The books won prizes, and they were fairly easy to write, so it was a step. At the time I wrote <em>Rabbit at Rest</em> I thought the time had come to put him to rest. It was not as if I was a writer who could only write about this guy. I had a good long run of it and it was time to let go.</p> <p><strong>His death was spectacularly realistic.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Was it? I wasn’t sure. It was almost corny to take him back to another street game, because you first see him in <em>Rabbit, Run</em> joining some kids around a telephone pole playing basketball, but that said, it felt good to me, that whole thing. I went down to Florida and did some research, walked around Ft. Myers, tried to get a feel for a Florida city, and it was fun to do the research and fun to write those scenes. You do get very wrapped up in these characters and care about them. You don’t want to get sentimental about them, but yes. And the doctor he sees tells him he must find something to do. Rabbit’s trouble is that he hasn’t really had enough to do since he stopped playing basketball.</p> <p>And there’s his wonderful companion in these books. Janice, his wife, and Nelson, his son. They were the principals in the first novel. I had the pleasure not only of seeing Rabbit age, but of trying to turn Nelson from an infant into a man, and a man with a grudge, and yet a man with certain qualities, but it’s a destructive capability that Harry can’t match in the end, because Harry was destructive when young but he has become kind of a sweet old geezer towards the end.</p> <p><strong>A 56-year-old geezer?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Yeah, a 56-year-old geezer. He feels old to himself, and of course he is overweight and he is kind of among the retirees down there, and if you’ll remember he is banished for some sexual behavior, so he’s kind of alone and he doesn’t feel too wanted in the world.</p> <p><strong>Let’s talk about your childhood. What was it like for you, being an only child and living with your grandparents and your parents?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: My mother’s parents had the house and my father had the earning ability, such as it was, so they combined forces about the time I was born in ’32. It was the Depression, and my grandfather had been a man of some means. He had retired from farming, bought some securities and then the securities let him down. So, I was born into a fairly dire situation, and I think one of the reasons that I never had any siblings was that it was economically pinched and my father didn’t feel entitled to invite any more people into the world. But, for the one that did get through, me, there was kind of bliss. Actually, I had all this adult attention and whatever adult energy was there was focused on me. My grandparents were old country folk and would speak Pennsylvania Dutch between themselves, although my grandfather spoke a rather elegant English. But yeah, they moderated the effect of my parents. So, instead of an Oedipal triangle, I had a kind of pentagon, which in a way is better, so it was nice.</p> <p>My mother was unusual in that generation in that she had a master’s degree. She had gotten one at Cornell and was hoping to become a writer or something artistic, but instead she took a job selling drapes in the local department store. She did that for a couple of years. I remember the department store with my mother behind the drapes counter as kind of a romantic place. There’s all these goods and smells of a department store, and escalators, which were a novelty then. But when my father got a job teaching, she became a housewife and stayed a housewife.</p> <p>It was nice. I can’t complain. It was a fairly crowded neighborhood so there were lots of other children. Mostly girls as it turned out, so that I really only had one boy playmate, but the town itself was small and compact. The kind of town you can ride from one end to the other on a bike without too much danger or pumping.</p> <p><strong>You’re talking about Shillington?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Shillington, Pennsylvania. It was a suburb of Reading, which is the metropolis. Kind of a beautiful city actually, Reading. Most people have not been there and I don’t urge you to go, but it is kind of wonderful. It has a pagoda on a mountain. It’s Mt. Penn, and there’s a Pagoda built by some eccentric playboy in the ’20s. It has its scenic delights. I always loved Reading, and when I came to write <em>Rabbit Run</em> I had the prior joy of trying to imagine what it would be like to be in Reading. So yes, this was my horizon. Shillington first, Reading half way on the horizon, and on the extreme horizon Philadelphia, where we went maybe two or three times a year.</p> <p><strong>The move from Shillington to Plowville at 13 must have been somewhat traumatic.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I think any move annoys a child a great deal. All a child asks is that the world hold still while he or she grows up, and many of us don’t get that wish. I was happy in Shillington and I was a school teacher’s son. I had a slight presence. I wasn’t especially popular or athletic or anything, but I was smart — “schmart” as they used to say. And so, I was — it was fine in Shillington and I kind of knew the ropes but my mother wanted to get back to the soil and back to her own roots, which were at this farm. It wasn’t the most traumatic thing, like moving to Los Angeles when you’re living in the Bronx. That would be traumatic. But no, I continued to go to the same school with my father. I became a commuter. He and I became joint commuters and in a way I saw a lot more of my father than most boys, American boys do, so that was good. He and I went back and forth together and had adventures. I have written about this in a number of places but a novel called <em>The Centaur</em> is my main monument to those days with my father, struggling for the dollar and cars to keep breaking down and the snow storms to keep coming under your wheels. But, it was beautiful because I saw what it was like to be an American man. I saw that it’s a struggle, not easy to be an American man.</p> <p><strong>You’ve said that you read a lot on the farm.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Yes, of course. I had read somewhat before. I was an only child after all and only children tend to read. My mother was a keen reader. My grandfather was a Bible and newspaper reader, so I saw a lot of reading around me. It’s a world that a child can control. There were things called <em>Big Little Books</em> then, which were essentially bound comic strips with one panel opposite a page of text, and it was an easy way to read, so I read a lot of those. Then I graduated to mystery novels, some science fiction, the <em>New Yorker</em> humor.</p> <p><strong>Who were your favorite authors?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I loved Agatha Christie, of course. And also, an American team called Ellery Queen. I read a lot of Ellery Queen. Erle Stanley Gardner. I must have read 40 books by Erle Stanley Gardner before I was 15 or so. So, I got the reading habit, and I slightly branched out, you know, and challenged myself. I remember at the age of 15 going into the library and pulling down <em>The Waste Land</em> by T.S. Eliot and reading it because I had heard that this was a modern masterpiece. So, it was random reading, but maybe that’s the best kind in a way. It’s not forced on you and you get these glimpses, you know, of a wonderful world of books. In Reading there was a lovely Carnegie-endowed library with walls of books, and I remember I read through a whole shelf of P.G. Wodehouse. Again my taste was to humor, I think, and it’s odd that I didn’t become a humorist really, although — just some humor perhaps in my work — but my first ambition as a writer was to become a humorous writer, to be like Thurber and Benchley and the lighter E.B. White, you know, to make people laugh. I thought that was a harmless thing to do. A thing that society never could have too much of, laughter. Anyway, I did a lot of reading. I remember I used to lie on this old sofa with a box of raisins, and I’d read as many as two books in one afternoon and eat maybe — I hope not the whole box — but a fair amount of the box of raisins. That was my diet for a while.</p> <p><strong>Were there teachers who encouraged your writing at any point?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Yes. As a teacher’s son they were friendly to me, and I had a better understanding of teachers. They weren’t the enemy, as they were for so many children.</p> <p>I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I’d like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I’ve tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.</p> <p><strong>What did your dad teach?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Math. He taught junior high math and first year algebra. I sat in his classes for three years, which is a long time to be a student of your father, but luckily I was good enough at math, and he was sort of relaxed about having his son in the class. He wasn’t harder on me or kinder to me than he was to the others, so it was good. Good to see your father at work, too, in a way, isn’t it? A lot of kids never know what their father does and can’t understand it. It’s sort of something mysterious that happens in an office in a skyscraper.</p> <p>I remember a little ritual when I was in the sixth or seventh or eighth grade, helping him lay out the tablets. The first day of school, the Tuesday after Labor Day, the kids would arrive and find their tablets and pencils. Somehow that little sort of ceremony I remember as very precious. But I never wanted to be a teacher, and I spent some energy trying to avoid teaching as a matter of fact.</p> <p><strong>You mean the little teaching you’ve done hasn’t thrilled you?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: It was hard. Harvard asked me to do the creative writing course one summer, and I did it. There were some good students, and there were some students who didn’t show up, and there were some indifferent students. There were 15 in all, but I found that the effect upon me was not good, because these things didn’t seem that much worse than stuff I was writing at the same time. And this effort of approaching a piece of fiction as though there’s something slightly wrong with it that can be fixed is maybe not the gestalt approach that a real writer ought to have. So this wanting to lift it up to one more level of readability or interest, some men and women can do it. Joyce Carol Oates seems to thrive on teaching, but for me it just made the precariousness of what I was doing all the more evident to me.</p> <p><strong>We understand you had a stuttering problem when you were young.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I still do. Now and then it crops up, but maybe because the people I talk to are more kindly and respectful now, I don’t stutter. Stuttering is kind of — I suppose it shows basic fright. Like in the comic strips, when people begin to stutter it’s because they’re afraid. And also, a feeling that — my father thought that I had too many words to get out all at once. So, I didn’t speak very pleasingly, but I never stopped speaking or trying to communicate this way, and I think the stuttering has gotten better over the years. I have found having a microphone is a great help, because you don’t have to force your voice out of your throat, just a little noise will work. But, it was real enough, and one of the things — you know, you write because you don’t talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn’t an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.</p> <p><strong>Did they actually speak publicly?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: My grandfather could have. He was kind of an amateur politician who never really ran for office, but he did talk, and I would hear him sitting in the living room and talking. My mother did not speak in public, but she was quite eloquent in private. My father, of course, was a school teacher, which meant he was a performer of sorts, and entertained the students to a degree. So I grew up around people who could talk.</p> <p><strong>You’ve said that it was fairly easy to write the Rabbit books. Do you write methodically? Do you have a schedule that you stick to?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Since I’ve gone to some trouble not to teach, and not to have any other employment, I have no reason not to go to my desk after breakfast and work there until lunch. So, I work three or four hours in the morning, and it’s not all covering blank paper with beautiful phrases. You begin by answering a letter or two. There’s a lot of junk in your life as a writer and most people have junk in their lives. But, I try to give about three hours to the project at hand and to move it along. There’s a danger if you don’t move it along steadily that you’re going to forget what it’s about, so you must keep in touch with it I figure. So once embarked, yes, I do try to stick to a schedule. I’ve been maintaining this schedule off and on — well, really since I moved up to Ipswich in ’57. It’s a long time to be doing one thing. I don’t know how to retire. I don’t know how to get off the horse, though. I still like to do it. I still love books coming out. I love the smell of glue and the shiny look of the jacket and the type, and to see your own scribbles turned into more or less impeccable type. It’s still a great thrill for me, so I will probably persevere a little longer, but I do think maybe the time has come for me to be a little less compulsive, and maybe abandon the book-a-year technique which has been basically the way I’ve operated.</p> <p><strong>We’ve spoken to a number of writers who said they wrote a certain number of pages every day. There’s a lot to be said for having a routine you can’t run away from.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Right. It saves you from giving up. This present novel that will be out — <em>Villages</em> — I several times thought it might be a bad idea and kind of abandoned it. So, it was really the habit — the habit of writing that kept me at it in the end. It was like a bad marriage. I mean, whatever. This is the wife I’m married to here, and I’m going to finish this book. Finishing it becomes the only way to get rid of it. So yes, it’s good to have a certain doggedness to your technique. In college I was struck by the fact that Bernard Shaw, who became a playwright only after writing five novels, would sit in the British Museum, the reading room, and his quota was something like maybe five pages a day, but when he got to the last word on the last page, — whether it was the middle of a sentence — he would stop. So this notion that when you have a quota, whether it’s two pages or — three is how I think of it, three pages — that it’s a fairly modest quota, but nevertheless if you do it, really do it, the stuff will accumulate.</p> <p><strong>You’ve recently published early stories. How does it feel to look back on work that you’ve done decades ago?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Well, of course it brought back to me the life I was living at the time, and the various real people who lurk behind some of the characters, so it was a trip down memory lane for me. The only novelty really in the book was that I rearranged them thematically, so that a kind of a smuggled autobiography flows beneath the full run of the stories. I suppose a stronger writer or a more self-critical one might have made a selection, but I thought somehow the value of the book might be in doing them all. Doing all the ones that were good enough to get into print — most of them in <em>The New Yorker</em>. A few <em>The New Yorker</em> turned down, but I thought this standard was enough for a writer to become terribly judgmental about his work. Some of the stories could stand a little improvement, which I was happy to bestow, so for me it was an exercise in rewriting to some extent. I’m glad I did it. It’s sort of one of the books that’s going to be too heavy to read with comfort, and I’m sorry about that. It’s a heavy book but there is some kind of statement. Some kind of a new focus is being applied to these old stories just from the way they’re arranged.</p> <p><strong>Do you feel that you have changed in your way of writing? You said in an interview that you thought the early Rabbit books might have been written too fast.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I’ve rewritten the early books to some extent. <em>Rabbit Run</em> had some legal troubles. It was considered racy at the time, and so some sexually explicit bits were taken out and they were later restored, so I was happy. I put them back because the climate suddenly became, you know, “What’s the fuss?” And, then again I looked at them — I reread the whole bunch when they were put into an Everyman four-volume. So there has been some rewriting. There’s a danger of an older man rewriting a younger man now. You might just throw out the baby with the bath water somehow. I didn’t rewrite. I wasn’t looking for trouble with the early short stories, but when you’re young I think you’re so surprised to find yourself writing at all that you jump on almost any word that will work. And, when you’re older you sort of know there are lots of words, lots of words that you could use, and so your writing becomes a little less inspired and a little more plodding and careful. But, I did marvel at some of the phrases that the younger Updike tossed off. “I couldn’t do this now,” I said to myself, so I’m glad I did it when I could do it.</p> <p><strong>You were a little more devil-may-care?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Yeah, devil-may-care, and being more fully persuaded that I had something unique to bring to these ordinary people and ordinary days to some extent. I was bringing a kind of verbal care, verbal elegance that they wouldn’t otherwise get. So in a way, I felt I had a franchise to maintain, and maybe the writing is too self-cherishing in spots. You know the saying that you should write invisibly, that writing should be invisible. I think people know they’re reading a book, and that this object in front of them is a page of words. What I really like in a book is the sense that the writing is itself entertaining, or interesting, or it makes you want to read a sentence twice.</p> <p><strong>What influence do you think your drawing and art abilities have had on your prose?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I think I try harder to visualize the physical setting. The room, the dress, the face. I’m not sure I always succeed, and there’s a way in which you can suffocate an image under words by putting too many. You know, you can handle, say, “a pale, young lady with arched eyebrows,” but once you start going into the eyebrows hair by hair and do the earrings on top of it, you get sort of no image. You get no image, so you have to watch this tendency to over-specify. But, I think it is good to — Conrad spoke about helping the reader, making the reader see, see, televise the word, and I think there is that in my writing. A belief that seeing is not quite all, but seeing is a lot of it, and so I hope to see it in my own mind and then to transfer it to the reader’s mind as best I can. But you know, readers are different and they all have different experiences. “Bed,” the word “bed” means one thing to you, another thing to me, and where I would never have read exactly the word that you would have read yourself, but nevertheless we’re all in the same rough human ballpark here, and I think communication can occur.</p> <p><strong>You’ve reviewed many of your contemporaries. That can’t have been an easy task since you must know some of these people. What do you think the reviewing has done for you?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I didn’t set out to become a reviewer much, but I did. I was a <em>New Yorker</em> writer and looking for any way in which I could appear in the magazine and sell, and I began to drift into reviewing by 1960, not very many at first. They had other reviewers, but as they died off, I became for a while almost the main reviewer. I did more reviews than anybody else, and you could say I was doing too many. I did try to avoid American contemporaries, many of whom, as you say, I knew, because who knows where envy or friendship enter in and distort the honesty of the book report. So, I tried to review foreign, dead or European or Latin American writers. There was a lot of ferment and magic realism. The novel in Europe was much more overtly experimental than I’m aware of it being now. So I thought there were things I could learn, just as a reader, from reading these books, so I tried to read books that would further my own education, as well as earn me the money of the book review and keep me up.</p> <p>It’s very easy — when you’ve written for those three or four hours — your appetite for words is rather diminished, so it’s all too easy to not read much, so the reviews did keep me reading and acquainted with trends. Trends in what do we do with this old dinosaur — the novel. Because the novel is a very capacious plastic. It’s sort of what you make it, and it’s taken many forms. <em>Ulysses</em> is — you can’t repeat that, but that is an example of a novel that really tried to do everything. So we post-moderns are faced with this notion that maybe we’re not taking it far enough. We’re accepting the old conventions, quote marks and “he said, she said,” when we had these experimental writers who have done so much. So anyway, it’s good in a way to make yourself think about these basic issues. Why are you doing this at all? What are you bringing to it that’s different? Are you just feeding the machine or are you in some way altering the machine? All these things are probably up to a point useful, but in the end you’re left with your own intuitions and your own sense of — whatever — beauty or meaning or urgency.</p> <p><strong>What writers do you enjoy reading? What novels do you read for fun or amazement?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: There are a number of contemporary writers whose work I used to try to keep up with faithfully. Anne Tyler was one when she was younger, before she became a best-seller. I thought she was really quite a magical writer, and a very sweet-natured novelist, no gripes. Just trying to show you what I tried to do, to show ordinary life as being worth writing about.</p> <p>Philip Roth is, of course, a marvelous writer, and a great liberator of what could be said. I have fallen behind, after reviewing and admiring his earlier work a great deal. Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch were English writers that I tried to keep up with. I’m trying to think of what I’m reading now, and all I get is some proofs of my own book, but I know there have been some. I recently reviewed a book called <em>The Master</em> by an Irish writer called Colm Toibin. Very interesting in the attempt, but it was static in a strange way. But it was an honorable attempt to write a novel that had never been written before. I don’t think Henry James has been the hero of too many novels!</p> <p>I also reviewed a lot of classics that I would do well to reread, or else to read for the first time. I recently read <em>Vanity Fair</em> at long last. Here I am, 70-odd years old, and I never read <em>Vanity Fair</em>! In a way that is the most enjoyable, when you put yourself to school with an old classic.</p> <p><strong>You mentioned Conrad earlier.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: Yes. I read a fair amount of Conrad and there are still some left that I never got around to, but he’s wonderful, amazing. Amazing that he did all this in a second language, or maybe a third language even, but he had the ability to make the novel seem serious. At the same time he had this backlog of exotic ports and sailing, being a ship master, so he had a lot of middlebrow experience plus this highbrow approach to what writing was all about. That makes for a very tonic kind of fiction I think.</p> <p><strong>There are undoubtedly going to be some would-be writers, and young just-starting-out writers who will be listening to you talking about writing. Do you have some advice for them?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: You hesitate to give advice to young writers, because there’s a limit to what you can say. It’s not exactly like being a musician, or even an artist, where there’s a set number of skills that have to be mastered. I marvel at musicians, by the way, that people can play the piano and the violin with that speed and that accuracy. Obviously they need a lot of training. Sometimes writers need no training, and some of the amateur ones who just jump in do better than the ones who have the Ph.D. in creative writing. Colleges are very willing now to teach you, to give you a whole course of creative writing classes. Although I took some when I was a student, I’m a little skeptical about the value.</p> <p>I think that maybe what young writers have lost is the sense of writing as a trade. When I was young it was still a trade. There were enough magazines — middlebrow magazines, so-called general interest magazines — they ran articles but also fiction, and you felt that there was an appetite out there for this sort of fiction. The academic publications run fiction, but I don’t think they have quite replaced them in this sense. Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it. So I don’t sneer at writers like Stephen King who have managed to capture the interest of a large audience. Any way that you can break through. I figure if you don’t have any audience you shouldn’t be doing this. Tom Wolfe, the journalist, has spouted off very eloquently about the failure of the American writers to galvanize readership the way he thinks Zola and Dreiser and some others did. I think you can force this. We can’t do Zola now exactly. Somehow it just doesn’t sing. So you’re sort of stuck with being a — whatever — post-modern.</p> <p>To the young writers, I would merely say, “Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour say — or more — a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day. Henry Greene, one of my pets, was an industrialist actually. He was running a company, and he would come home and write for just an hour in an armchair, and wonderful books were created in this way. So, take it seriously, you know, just set a quota. Try to think of communicating with some ideal reader somewhere. Try to think of getting into print. Don’t be content just to call yourself a writer and then bitch about the crass publishing world that won’t run your stuff. We’re still a capitalist country, and writing to some degree is a capitalist enterprise, when it’s not a total sin to try to make a living and court an audience. “Read what excites you,” would be advice, and even if you don’t imitate it you will learn from it. All those mystery novels I read I think did give me some lesson about keeping a plot taut, trying to move forward or make the reader feel that kind of a tension is being achieved, a string is being pulled tight. Other than that, don’t try to get rich on the other hand. If you want to get rich, you should go into investment banking or being a certain kind of a lawyer. But, on the other hand, I would like to think that in a country this large — and a language even larger — that there ought to be a living in it for somebody who cares, and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.</p> <p><strong>Before we go, we’d like to ask if you have a concept of the American Dream.</strong></p> <p>John Updike: I certainly bought into the American Dream that was voiced by the propagandists of World War II, and I was a great moviegoer, and the movies in the ’30s and ’40s were where you could see preachments about the American dream. So, I still believe in the American Dream. I see it in terms of freedom, and a government that trusts its people to exercise freedom, that this is not a government that allows you to give, that allows you to explore, and doesn’t dampen your own creativity — in the broadest sense — with a lot of dictums or dogmas or restraints. So, insofar as we can remain a free country that allows for the interplay of personal energies. I think this is still a country that is not only working towards a dream, but actually is the dream in action. For all of the knocks that we take in the foreign press, and we have taken a lot lately, I think this is still a country where people want to come, and they want to come, I think, because they feel they are — a French friend of one of my stepsons, a boy about 16, just said about the way people dress in America, he said, “They are not afraid.” I thought this was a great insight, you know. In France, a lot of people — the French are in a way afraid not to dress in the appropriate costume of a happy housewife or whatever, and there is a kind of sense of the proper way to dress. And, in America you have the sense — so that was his way of saying that it’s a country without a government we need be afraid of. The country, the land has been good to me. I realize I was lucky, and born at a lucky time, too. So, I hesitate to prescribe for today’s children, but I would hope they would grow up with something of the same sense that it’s a privilege to be an American.</p> <p><strong>What was your reaction when <em>U and I</em> came out, a book by a talented young contemporary writer, Nicholson Baker, about his admiration for you?</strong></p> <p>John Updike: It was funny. I think Random House was the publisher, and they weren’t sure how I’d react, so I was shown a photocopy of the manuscript fairly late in the game. But how could I not be pleased by it? As you say, it’s the homage of a younger writer, and what’s charming about it is that Baker, with his gift for precision, admits he hasn’t read an awful lot of me. The long list of books by me he has not read, and some of the things that he chose to take as inspirational, in fact, were either not there at all or were not there in quite the way he remembered them. So it was a very good image of how we use other writers. We take what we want and we take what we need, and I’m happy to have been of some use to Nicholson Baker really. I was very moved and amused by it, because it’s funny.</p> <p>You asked me who I liked to read. Well, I do read everything that Nicholson Baker writes, not only because he flattered me in this way, but because I think he’s very interesting and really is trying to tackle the whole fiction ball from a different angle. I’ve never seen anybody who writes quite like him or admits to these obsessions. Talk about the daily and the picayune small things! His last book, <em>A Box of Matches</em>, was very much the sort of hyper-Updike in the details. I was pleased and amused by the book and grateful for it.</p> <p><strong>And we are all grateful for all that you’ve written, and thank you for the great interview.</strong></p> <p>Thank you.</p> <p><strong>It was a great pleasure.</strong></p> </div>  </aside>  <div class="read-more__toggle collapsed" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#full-interview"><a href="#" class="sans-4 btn">Read full interview</a></div> </article> </section> </div> <div class="tab-pane fade" id="gallery" role="tabpanel"> <section class="isotope-wrapper">  <header class="toolbar toolbar--gallery bg-white clearfix"> <div class="col-md-6"> <div class="serif-4">John Updike Gallery</div> </div> <div class="col-md-6 text-md-right isotope-toolbar"> <ul class="list-unstyled list-inline m-b-0 text-brand-primary sans-4"> <li class="list-inline-item" data-filter=".photo"><i class="icon-icon_camera"></i>13 photos</li> </ul> </div> </header> <div class="isotope-gallery isotope-box single-achiever__gallery clearfix"> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.66315789473684" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50317392.jpg" data-image-caption="Author John Updike sitting with his wife Mary and children, September 1966. (Photo by Truman Moore/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="John Updike [& Family]" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50317392-380x252.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50317392-760x504.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.73684210526316" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-Updike-John-corbis-0000217715-008.jpg" data-image-caption="Pulitzer Prize author John Updike, in Paris, France, 1986. (© Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA)" data-image-copyright="wp-Updike John corbis 0000217715-008" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-Updike-John-corbis-0000217715-008-380x280.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-Updike-John-corbis-0000217715-008-760x560.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.0326086956522" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-Updike-Getty-50418766.jpg" data-image-caption="" data-image-copyright="wp-Updike-Getty-50418766" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-Updike-Getty-50418766-368x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-Updike-Getty-50418766-736x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.5230460921844" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-Updike-Corbis-ZXX13914180.jpg" data-image-caption="Portrait of John Updike. (Corbis)" data-image-copyright="Portrait of John Updike" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-Updike-Corbis-ZXX13914180-250x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-Updike-Corbis-ZXX13914180-499x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.90131578947368" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-bio-wp-chicago_1216_JFR-1.jpg" data-image-caption="Naomi Judd presenting the Golden Plate Award to John Updike at the 2004 International Achievement Summit." data-image-copyright="updike bio-wp-chicago_1216_JFR" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-bio-wp-chicago_1216_JFR-1-380x343.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-bio-wp-chicago_1216_JFR-1-760x685.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.5049504950495" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-chicago_0963_JFR.jpg" data-image-caption="John Updike addressing student delegates at the 2004 International Achievement Summit in Chicago. (© Academy of Achievement)" data-image-copyright="wp-chicago_0963_JFR" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-chicago_0963_JFR-252x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-chicago_0963_JFR-505x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.3427561837456" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50644628.jpg" data-image-caption="<i>TIME</i> magazine featured Updike on its cover on April 26, 1968. His novel <i>Couples</i> had inspired the magazine's report on "The Adulterous Society." (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="John Updike [Misc.]" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50644628-283x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50644628-566x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.496062992126" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50397188.jpg" data-image-caption="John Updike juggles apples, and careers, at home in Ipswich, 1966. (Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="John Updike" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50397188-254x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-50397188-508x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.65263157894737" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3272461.jpg" data-image-caption="John Updike, 1976. (Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="John Updike" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3272461-380x248.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3272461-760x496.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.3996316758748" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3200197.jpg" data-image-caption="American author and Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike in a youthful portrait, circa 1955. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="Young Updike" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3200197-272x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-3200197-543x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.3240418118467" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-2840854.jpg" data-image-caption="<i>TIME</i> magazine cover depicts an illustration of author John Updike by Alex Katz with the headline "Going great at 50," October 12, 1982. (Photo by Time Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="Time Magazine Cover October 18, 1982" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-2840854-287x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-2840854-574x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="1.7194570135747" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-rabbit-run.jpg" data-image-caption="<i>Rabbit, Run</i>, a 1960 novel by John Updike. It spawned several sequels, including <i>Rabbit Redux</i>, <i>Rabbit Is Rich</i> and <i>Rabbit at Rest</i>, as well as a related 2001 novella, <i>Rabbit Remembered</i>." data-image-copyright="updike-rabbit-run" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-rabbit-run-221x380.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/updike-rabbit-run-442x760.jpg"></div>  </figure> <figure class="isotope-item ratio-container--gallery photo" data-category="photo" data-ratio="0.65921052631579" title="" data-gtm-category="photo" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Achiever - ">   <div class="lazyload ratio-container__image" data-toggle="modal" data-target="#imageModal" data-image-src="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-GettyImages-118795920_master.jpg" data-image-caption="American writer John Updike on April 18, 1986 in Paris, France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)" data-image-copyright="John Updike - Portrait Session" data-sizes="auto" data-bgset="/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-GettyImages-118795920_master-380x251.jpg [(max-width:576px)] | /wp-content/uploads/2016/07/wp-GettyImages-118795920_master-760x501.jpg"></div>  </figure>    </div> </section> </div> </div> <div class="container"> <footer class="editorial-article__footer col-md-8 col-md-offset-4"> <div class="editorial-article__next-link sans-3"> <a href="#"><strong>What's next:</strong> <span class="editorial-article__next-link-title">profile</span></a> </div> <ul class="social list-unstyled list-inline ssk-group m-b-0"> <li class="list-inline-item"><a href="" class="ssk ssk-facebook" data-gtm-category="social" data-gtm-action="click" data-gtm-label="Shared Achiever on Facebook"><i class="icon-icon_facebook-circle"></i></a></li> <li class="list-inline-item"><a href="" class="ssk ssk-twitter" data-gtm-category="social" data-gtm-action="click" 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Carson, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jimmy-carter/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jimmy Carter</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/johnny-cash/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Johnny Cash</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/william-j-clinton/"><span class="achiever-list-name">William J. Clinton</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/francis-s-collins/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/denton-a-cooley/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Denton A. Cooley, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/francis-ford-coppola/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Francis Ford Coppola</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ray-dalio/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ray Dalio</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/olivia-de-havilland/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dame Olivia de Havilland</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/michael-e-debakey-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Michael E. DeBakey, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/michael-dell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Michael S. Dell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ron-dennis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ron Dennis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/joan-didion/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Joan Didion</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-herbert-donald-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David Herbert Donald, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-doubilet/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David Doubilet</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/rita-dove/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Rita Dove</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sylvia-earle/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sylvia Earle, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/elbaradei/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mohamed ElBaradei</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/gertrude-elion/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Gertrude B. Elion, M.Sc.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/larry-j-ellison/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Larry J. Ellison</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nora-ephron/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nora Ephron</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/julius-erving/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Julius Erving</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/tony-fadell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Tony Fadell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/paul-farmer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Paul Farmer, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/suzanne-farrell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Suzanne Farrell</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/anthony-s-fauci-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Anthony S. Fauci, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sally-field/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sally Field</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lord-norman-foster/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lord Norman Foster</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/aretha-franklin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Aretha Franklin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/milton-friedman-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Milton Friedman, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-fuentes/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Fuentes</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/athol-fugard/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Athol Fugard</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernest-j-gaines/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ernest J. Gaines</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/william-h-gates-iii/"><span class="achiever-list-name">William H. Gates III</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leymah-gbowee/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leymah Gbowee</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-gehry/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank O. Gehry</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/murray-gell-mann-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Murray Gell-Mann, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carlos-ghosn/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carlos Ghosn</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/vince-gill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Vince Gill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ruth-bader-ginsburg/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ruth Bader Ginsburg</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/louise-gluck/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Louise Glück</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/whoopi-goldberg/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Whoopi Goldberg</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jane-goodall/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dame Jane Goodall</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/doris-kearns-goodwin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Doris Kearns Goodwin, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mikhail-s-gorbachev/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mikhail S. Gorbachev</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nadine-gordimer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nadine Gordimer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/stephen-jay-gould/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Stephen Jay Gould, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carol-greider-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carol Greider, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-grisham/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Grisham</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-john-gurdon/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir John Gurdon</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dorothy-hamill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dorothy Hamill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/demis-hassabis-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Demis Hassabis, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/lauryn-hill/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lauryn Hill</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-edmund-hillary/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Edmund Hillary</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/reid-hoffman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Reid Hoffman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/khaled-hosseini/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Khaled Hosseini, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ron-howard/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ron Howard</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-hume/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Hume</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/louis-ignarro-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Louis Ignarro, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/daniel-inouye/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Daniel K. Inouye</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jeremy-irons/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jeremy Irons</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-irving/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John Irving</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/kazuo-ishiguro/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Kazuo Ishiguro</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sir-peter-jackson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sir Peter Jackson</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/donald-c-johanson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Donald C. Johanson, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-m-johnson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank M. Johnson, Jr.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/philip-johnson/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Philip C. Johnson</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/chuck-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Chuck Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-earl-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James Earl Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/quincy-jones/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Quincy Jones</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/beverly-joubert/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Beverly Joubert</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/dereck-joubert/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Dereck Joubert</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/paul-kagame/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Paul Kagame</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/thomas-keller-2/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Thomas Keller</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/anthony-m-kennedy/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Anthony M. Kennedy</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/carole-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Carole King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/b-b-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">B.B. King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/coretta-scott-king/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Coretta Scott King</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/henry-kissinger-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Henry A. Kissinger, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/willem-j-kolff/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Willem J. Kolff, M.D., Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wendy-kopp/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wendy Kopp</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/henry-r-kravis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Henry R. Kravis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/nicholas-d-kristof/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Nicholas D. Kristof</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mike-krzyzewski/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mike Krzyzewski</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ray-kurzwell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ray Kurzweil</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/eric-lander-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Eric S. Lander, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/robert-s-langer-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert S. Langer, Sc.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/richard-leakey/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Richard E. Leakey</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leon-lederman-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leon Lederman, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/robert-lefkowitz-m-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Robert J. Lefkowitz, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/congressman-john-r-lewis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Congressman John R. Lewis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/maya-lin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Maya Lin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/george-lucas/"><span class="achiever-list-name">George Lucas</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/norman-mailer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Norman Mailer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/peyton-manning/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Peyton Manning</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/wynton-marsalis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Wynton Marsalis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/john-c-mather-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">John C. Mather, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/johnny-mathis/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Johnny Mathis</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ernst-mayr-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ernst Mayr, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/willie-mays/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Willie Mays</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/frank-mccourt/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Frank McCourt</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/david-mccullough/"><span class="achiever-list-name">David McCullough</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/audra-mcdonald/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Audra McDonald</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/admiral-william-h-mcraven/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Admiral William H. McRaven, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/w-s-merwin/"><span class="achiever-list-name">W. S. Merwin</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/reinhold-messner/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Reinhold Messner</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/james-a-michener/"><span class="achiever-list-name">James A. Michener</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/marvin-minsky-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Marvin Minsky, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/mario-j-molina-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Mario J. Molina, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/n-scott-momaday-ph-d/"><span class="achiever-list-name">N. Scott Momaday, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/story-musgrave/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Story Musgrave, M.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/ralph-nader/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Ralph Nader</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/peggy-noonan/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Peggy Noonan</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jessye-norman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jessye Norman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/tommy-norris/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Lt. Thomas R. Norris, USN</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/joyce-carol-oates/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Joyce Carol Oates</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/pierre-omidyar/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Pierre Omidyar</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/jimmy-page/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Jimmy Page</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/larry-page/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Larry Page</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/arnold-palmer/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Arnold Palmer</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/leon-panetta/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Leon Panetta</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/rosa-parks/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Rosa Parks</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/suzan-lori-parks/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Suzan-Lori Parks</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/linus-pauling/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Linus C. Pauling, Ph.D.</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/shimon-peres/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Shimon Peres</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/itzhak-perlman/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Itzhak Perlman</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-david-petraeus/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General David H. Petraeus, USA</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/sidney-poitier/"><span class="achiever-list-name">Sidney Poitier</span></a> </li> <li> <a href="/web/20190223071905/http://www.achievement.org/achiever/general-colin-l-powell/"><span class="achiever-list-name">General Colin L. 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