John Updike

(1932 - 2009)

“My subject,” John Updike once said, “is the American Protestant small-town middle class.” As a child he wanted to be a cartoonist for either Walt Disney or The New Yorker, the magazine with which he began his prolific affiliation as a writer in 1955. Over the course of the next fifty-four years, Updike won two Pulitzer Prizes and published twenty-three novels.

All Writing

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.

—John Updike, 1989

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

—John Updike, 1963

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