John Updike

John Updike (1932–2009) was an American writer, literary critic, and poet. Born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, he studied English at Harvard College and later attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. From 1955 to 1957, he worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker and subsequently pursued a career as a freelance author. His work included novels, short stories, poetry, and literary criticism. Among his honors were the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1982), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (1984), and the National Medal of Arts (1989). Updike died in Massachusetts in 2009.