Tuesday, January 27, 2009
News John Updike dies
Posted by Scott Henry @ScottTheHenry on Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 11:28 PM
He was 76 and had lung cancer. Here's a bit from the AP's take:
A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir "Self-Consciousness" and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, releasing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards.
He followed Norman Mailer by a couple of months, Kurt Vonnegut by a couple of years and Saul Bellow by a couple of years before that. They were of a generation of larger-than-life novelists who were also adept at writing essays, short stories and magazine articles – or making the rounds of the network talk shows when talk shows still booked novelists. Who's left of that stature anymore – Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and who else?
It's frankly a bit sad to be reminded that American popular culture doesn't celebrate writers and intellectuals in the way it used to in Updike's heyday.
Comments (2)
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Regarding the death of John Updike, it struck me as ironic that Philip Roth has been writing novels about his fictional alter egos facing disease and mortality for years, and yet Updike went before Roth. Apart from Roth, one of the few surviving writers from that generation is Gore Vidal. For the past decade, the most influential figures in literature have, alas, probably been J.K. Rowling and Oprah Winfrey.
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