John Updike: 1932-2009

Philadelphia Inquirer: Prolific.

That word springs up in almost every newspaper, radio and TV obituary on award-winning author John Updike, who died last Tuesday of lung cancer at age 76.

Prolific.

Well, yes, he was that. Why, for the New Yorker magazine alone, Updike wrote 327 book reviews, 170 short stories, 154 poems, and 158 Talk of the Town commentaries. Then there are his 50 books, collections of short stories, and poetry, including five novels about Pennsylvania car dealer Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, two of which — “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” — won Pulitzer Prizes.

So, prolific is an apt description of Updike. But it’s also inadequate. He was no automaton spitting out verbiage to be paid by the word. Updike had a lot to say about life in America — an inexhaustible subject.

Pennsylvania upbringing

Updike’s observations were often rooted in his own upbringing in the Pennsylvania farm town of Shillington. He wrote about work, marriage, men, women, sex, families, death and God. His meticulously selected prose breathed life into characters that will be with us in literature long after Updike is interred.

How best to remember Updike? His most prolific readers will have their favorite passages. But also consider observations he made in 2005 as one of National Public Radio’s series of “This I Believe” essays:

“I also believe, instinctively, if not very cogently, in the American political experiment, which I take to be, at bottom, a matter of trusting the citizens to know their own minds and best interests. ... Cosmically ... (the) power of materialist science to explain everything ... seems to be inarguable and the principal glory of the modern mind.”

You could call John Updike prolific, but that would not be his sum.