(born 1932) Updike is one of an increasingly rare number of American twentieth-century writers who manages to combine some degree of popular success with serious critical attention.

Although also an accomplished essayist and a poet, his fame primarily derives from his work as a novelist. One of his most successful fictional creations was former highschool basketball star and small-town businessman Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the hero of four different novels. Congenitally unfaithful and proudly unreflective, difficult to truly dislike in his essential innocence, Rabbit often seemed to personify Updike’s notion of America in the last decades of the twentieth century. While sometimes criticized for too narrow a focus, at his best Updike uses his considerable lyrical gifts to fashion a complex anthropological picture of a large segment of America—suburban. white, upper middle class and Protestant—coming to grips with the possibility of its decline.