John Updike

A NovelIn the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God's relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace at the movies, respite from ';the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God's withdrawal.' His son,...

In this follow-up to Bech: A Book, Henry Bech, the priapic, peripatetic, and unproductive Jewish American novelist, returns with seven more chapters from his mock-heroic life. He turns fifty in a confusing blend of civic and erotic circumstances while publicizing himself in Australia and Canada. He marries a shiksa and travels with her to Israel,...

And Other StoriesIn this midcareer collection of twenty-three short stories, John Updike tackles such problems as separation, divorce, and remarriage, parents and children, guns and prostitution, leprosy, swooning, suffocation, and guilt. His self-seeking heroes tend to be forty; his heroines are asleep, seductive, longing, or reproachful. None of...

And Other StoriesTo the hero of the title story of this collection, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: ';A miraculous lacquer lay upon everything, beading each roadside twig . . . each reed of thatch, each tiny daisy trembling in the grass.' All of these stories, each in its own way, partake of this glow, as life beyond middle...

A NovelGertrude and Claudius are the ';villains' of Hamlet: he the killer of Hamlet's father and usurper of the Danish throne, she his lusty consort, who marries Claudius before her late husband's body is cold. But in this imaginative ';prequel' to the play, John Updike makes a case for the royal couple that...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Howells Medal, and the National Book Critics Circle Award In John Updike's fourth and final novel about Harry ';Rabbit' Angstrom, the hero has acquired a Florida condo, a second grandchild, and a troubled, overworked heart. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically; his daughter-in-law, Pru, is...