About the book:
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom runs from his wife, his job, his life and can't stop running.
The great American novel about a man who peaked at 18 and spent the rest of his life knowing it.
Condition:
Great secondhand condition.
Wear to cover as pictured.
All pages well bound and intact.
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About the author:
John Updike (19322009)
John Updike was born John Hoyer Updike in Reading, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932, and grew up in nearby Shillington a childhood he would return to, transfigured, for the rest of his career. A mother with literary ambitions and a father who taught school gave him an early, permanent attention to language; a stammer and a case of psoriasis gave him an early, permanent attention to himself. He studied at Harvard, spent a year at Oxford, and landed at The New Yorker in his early twenties, where he stayed, in one capacity or another, for the next fifty years.
He found his subject almost immediately: the ordinary American married, restless, half-faithful to his wife and his God and he never really left it. Rabbit, Run (1960) introduced Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the ex-high-school-basketball-star whose flight from domestic life Updike would track across four novels and three decades, winning two Pulitzers along the way (Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest). The prose was the point as much as the plot dense, lyrical, almost indecently observant, capable of making a lawnmower or a golf swing feel like a small act of grace.
His debts were to Proust for the texture of memory, to Nabokov for the sentence-level pleasure, to Henry Green and Salinger for a certain ear, and to the American realists Lewis, Cheever for subject matter he'd spend a career refusing to apologize for. He wrote alongside Roth, Bellow, Mailer, and Oates, and effectively founded the suburban-domestic mode that Franzen, Eugenides, Moody, and Lorrie Moore would later inherit and complicate.
The recurring material marriage under strain, faith curdling into doubt, sex as both sacrament and symptom, small towns dying in real time never really varied, but the treatment never went slack either. He kept publishing, prolifically and well, into his seventies, working from his home in Massachusetts until lung cancer killed him on January 27, 2009, at seventy-six. His achievement, finally, was one of attention: he took the unexamined American life and examined it so closely it started to give off light.
