John Updike

Twenty-two-year-old Rabbit Angstrom is a salesman in a local department store, father of a preschool-age son, and husband to an alcoholic wife who was his second-best high school sweetheart. The squalor and tragedy of their lives reminds us that salvation is a personal undertaking.

Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie return to the old Rhode Island seaside town where they indulged in wicked mischief under the influence of the diabolical Darryl Van Horne. Darryl is gone, and their lovers of the time have aged or died, but enchantment remains in the familiar streets and scenery of the village, where they enjoyed their lusty primes as free and empowered women. And, among the local citizenry, there are still those who remember them, and wish...

In a small New England town in the late 1960s, there lived three witches Alexandra Spoffard, sculptress, could create thunderstorms. Jane Smart, a cellist, could fly. The local gossip columnist, Sukie Rougemont, could turn milk into cream. Divorced but hardly celibate, content but always ripe for adventure, our three wonderful witches one day found themselves quite under the spell of the new man in town, Darryl Van Horne, whose hot tub was the scene...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, returns—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century.
The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab...

Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed, Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late twentieth century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read--and remembered--for a long time to come.--Publisher.

Eighteen classic short stories that form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity—from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.

In 1956, Updike published a story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two...

This novel is a bildungsroman describing the education, romantic and otherwise, of Owen Mackenzie. Owen's education (at M.I.T.) and his successful software company take him from the village of his birth, Willow, in eastern Pennsylvania, to Haskell's Crossing, in eastern Massachusetts, where he expects to end his days. In the course of this modest life's journey, the communal humanity of villages, chiefly embodied in their female citizens, seeks to...

In John Updike's largest and most varied short story collection he captures people, their marriages, children, affairs, and wrings emotion from what others consider sterile suburbia.