John Updike was crucial to the development of American literature by virtue of combining his lyrical writing with his role as a moralist, said R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review.
Smith noted that Updike, who died Tuesday (Jan. 27, 2009), will also be remembered for having worked in almost every genre imaginable. He was acclaimed nearly as much for his short stories, poetry and critical essays as for his novels.
“There is hardly any kind of writing you can imagine that he didn’t do, except maybe military manuals,” said Smith.
Updike was “an intricate maker of sentences,” added Smith, who compared the structure of Updike’s paragraphs to “a house that has been eccentrically but very efficiently wired.”
Updike, 76, died in a hospice in Massachusetts, the state where he lived for many years. He wrote more than 50 books and is probably best known for his acclaimed Rabbit series. Two of the novels in that series won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
