Hired by The New Yorker practically straight out of college, as Adam Begley tells us in his new biography, he became a mainstay of its fiction section (and the best writer “The Talk of the Town” had ever seen) more or less immediately. He had been the boy wonder of American letters in the 1950s and 1960s. Some nineteen years before, near the end of the Rabbit tetralogy, the work on which his reputation will unquestionably rest, he had his hero muse about an author, recently deceased, who had “joined Roy Orbison and Bart Giamatti in that beyond where some celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn expand like balloons and become gods but where most shrivel and shrink into yellowing obituaries.”Įlvis and Marilyn or Orbison and Giamatti? Hemingway or Howells? By the time of his death, Updike might have suspected how doubtful his case had become. Beribboned as a chief of staff, prolific as a Mongol prince-beloved, ripened, rich, at rest-John Updike died in hospice near his home in coastal Massachusetts on January 27, 2009.
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