John Updike

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John Updike's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    64 Books (3 Series)
  • First Book:
    November 1960
  • Latest Book:
    October 2014
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Full Series List in Order

Bech

Bech: a Book (May-1970)
Bech is Back (Sep-1982)
Bech at Bay (Oct-1998)
Bech at Bay and Before (Oct-1998)
Basic Bech (Dec-1999)

Eastwick

1 - The Witches of Eastwick (Aug-1984)
2 - The Widows of Eastwick (Nov-2008)

A Rabbit Novel

Rabbit, Run (Nov-1960)
Rabbit Redux (Oct-1971)
Rabbit Is Rich (Sep-1981)
Rabbit At Rest (Dec-1990)

Book List in Order: 64 titles

  • Rabbit, Run

    A Rabbit Novel

    “A lacerating story of loss and of seeking, written in prose that is charged with emotion but is always held under impeccable control.” -- Kansas City StarRabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists...

  • Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

    When this classic collection of stories first appeared -- in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday -- Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresisti...

  • Centaur

    WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER   The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on ...

  • Assorted Prose of Updike

  • Same Door

    The title of John Updike’s first short story collection, published when the author was twenty-seven, alludes to the old superstition that you should enter and leave a house by the same door. Thus John Nordholm, the alternately shy and brash hero of...

  • Music School

    The Music School is a place of learning, in which a sheltered South Dakota boy meets his roommate at Harvard, a rebel with whom he will have a violent -- and ambiguous -- physical encounter; a warring married couple, Richard and Joan Maple, try and t...

  • Couples

    “Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shie...

  • Bech: a Book

    Bech

    The Jewish American novelist Henry Bech -- procrastinating, libidinous, and tart-tongued, his reputation growing while his powers decline -- made his first appearance in 1965, in John Updike’s “The Bulgarian Poetess.” That story won the O. Henr...

  • Rabbit Redux

    A Rabbit Novel

    In this sequel to Rabbit, Run, John Updike resumes the spiritual quest of his anxious Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Ten years have passed; the impulsive former athlete has become a paunchy thirty-six-year-old conservative, and Eisenhower’s...



  • Museums & Women And Other Stories

    Museums and Women gathers twenty-nine short stories from the 1960s and early 1970s. It is John Updike’s most various collection, a book as full of departures and surprises as the historical period that produced them. Some stories, such as the title...

  • Museums and Women

  • A Month of Sundays

    An antic riff on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, in which a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace -- from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed...

  • Marry Me

    Marry Me is subtitled “A Romance” because, in the author’s words, “people don’t act like that anymore.” The time is 1962, and the place is a fiefdom of Camelot called Greenwood, Connecticut. Jerry Conant and Sally Mathias are in love and ...

  • Poorhouse Fair

    “Brilliant . . . Here is the conflict of real ideas; of real personalities; here is a work of intellectual imagination and great charity. The Poorhouse Fair is a work of art.” -- The New York Times Book ReviewThe hero of John Updike’s first nov...

  • The Coup

    A novel that charts the violent events in an imaginary African nation, as told by the colonel and leader of the country -- from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series."What a ric...

  • Problems and Other Stories

    In this midcareer collection of twenty-three short stories, John Updike tackles such problems as separation, divorce, and remarriage, parents and children, guns and prostitution, leprosy, swooning, suffocation, and guilt. His self-seeking heroes tend...

  • The Dance of the Solids

    in Alchemy & Academe

    ENTER THE WORLD OF TRANSMUTATIONS -- MENTAL AND ELEMENTAL, ALCHEMICAL AND ACADEMIC NIGHT AND THE LOVES OF JOE DICOSTANZO by Samuel R. Delany When a young man living in an abandoned castle discovers he has strange and wonderful powers, he's delig...

  • Your Lover Just Called

    Joan and Richard Maple confess infidelities, join a Boston civil rights march, take a trip to their in-laws, to the beach, to Rome, and after 20 years attempt to explain to their four children why they have decided to separate....

  • Rabbit Is Rich

    A Rabbit Novel

    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 ...



  • Too Far to Go

    “The Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage,” writes the author in his Foreword, a marriage that is threatened early on by the temptations of infidelity (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”) and that ends in a midlife divorce (“...

  • Bech is Back

    Bech

    In this follow-up to Bech: A Book, Henry Bech, the priapic, peripatetic, and unproductive Jewish American novelist, returns with seven more chapters from his mock-heroic life. He turns fifty in a confusing blend of civic and erotic circumstances whil...

  • Hugging the Shore

    WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD   “Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But...

  • The Witches of Eastwick

    Eastwick - 1

    “John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters [and] The Witches of Eastwick [is one of his] most ambitious works. . . . [A] comedy of the blackest sort.” -- The New York Times Book ReviewToward the end of the Vietnam era, in a snu...

  • Picked-Up Pieces

    In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one word could sum up the young critic’s app...

  • Forty Stories

  • Of the Farm

    “A small masterpiece . . . With Of the Farm, John Updike has achieved a sureness of touch, a suppleness of style, and a subtlety of vision that is gained by few writers of fi ction.” -- The New York TimesIn this short novel, Joey Robinson, a thir...

  • Roger's Version

    As Roger Lambert tells it, he, a middle-aged professor of divinity, is buttonholed in his office by Dale Kohler, an earnest young computer scientist who believes that quantifiable evidence of God’s existence is irresistibly accumulating. The theolo...

  • Trust Me

    The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all. Love pangs, a favorite subject of the author, take...

  • The Alligators



  • Self-Consciousness

    John Updike’s memoirs consist of six Emersonian essays that together trace the inner shape of the life, up to the age of fifty-five, of a relatively fortunate American male. The author has attempted, his Foreword states, “to treat this life, this...

  • S.

    S. is the story of Sarah P. Worth, a thoroughly modern spiritual seeker who has become enamored of a Hindu mystic called the Arhat. A native New Englander, she goes west to join his ashram in Arizona, and there struggles alongside fellow sannyasins (...

  • Rabbit At Rest

    A Rabbit Novel

    PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • One of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century brings back ex-basketball player Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the late middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, who has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a ...

  • Memories of the Ford Administration

    When historian Alfred “Alf” Clayton is invited by an academic journal to record his impressions of the Gerald R. Ford Administration (1974"77), he recalls not the political events of the time but rather a turbulent period of his own sexual past...

  • Brazil

    In the dream-Brazil of John Updike’s imagining, almost anything is possible if you are young and in love. When Tristão Raposo, a black nineteen-year-old from the Rio slums, and Isabel Leme, an eighteen-year-old upper-class white girl, meet on Copa...

  • The Afterlife and Other Stories

    “Marvelously moving . . . These tales evoke a certain peace and a definite wonder at what an astonishingly graceful writer Updike is.” -- USA TodayTo the hero of the title story of this collection, all of England has the glow of an afterlife: “...

  • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects

  • Scenes from the Fifties

    These stories of John Updike's offer, among others, a portrait of an ageing Boston antiques dealer reflecting on his still-hopeful youth, when in 1959, as a young but unsuccessful artist, he moves with his wife and daughter out of New York to New Eng...

  • Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy

  • In the Beauty of the Lilies

    In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace at the movies, respite from “th...



  • Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf

    John Updike wrote about the lure of golf for five decades, from the first time he teed off at the age of twenty-five until his final rounds at the age of seventy-six. Golf Dreams collects the most memorable of his golf pieces, high-spirited eviden...

  • Toward the End of Time

    Set in the near future of 2020, this disconcerting philosophical fantasy depicts an America devastated by a war with China that has left its populace decimated, its government a shambles, and its natural resources tainted. The hero is Ben Turnbull, a...

  • Bech at Bay

    Bech

    In this, the final volume in John Updike’s mock-heroic trilogy about the Jewish American writer Henry Bech, our hero is older but scarcely wiser. Now in his seventies, he remains competitive, lecherous, and self-absorbed, lost in a brave new litera...

  • Bech at Bay and Before

    Bech

    4 cassettes / 6 hours
    Read by Ron Rifkin

    Catch up with Bech.

    This unique AudioBook collects John Updikes classic Bech novels, Bech: A Book (1970), Bech is Back (1982), and the latest installment, Bech at Bay.

    "Mr. Updike finds...

  • A Child's Calendar

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    A deluxe 20th anniversary edition of one of the first major award-winning titles to feature an interracial family, A Child's Calendar combines the star power of John Updike and Trina Schart Hyman. Celebrate the little moments that make each month ...

  • Basic Bech

    Bech

    Basic Bech combines two classic titles -- Bech: A Book and Bech is Back -- from one of John Updike's most beloved characters.Henry Bech, the celebrated author of Travel Light, has been scrutinized, canonized and vilified by reviewers, academics, crit...

  • Gertrude and Claudius

    Gertrude and Claudius are the “villains” of Hamlet: he the killer of Hamlet’s father and usurper of the Danish throne, she his lusty consort, who marries Claudius before her late husband’s body is cold. But in this imaginative “prequel” t...

  • Licks of Love

    In this brilliant late-career collection, John Updike revisits many of the locales of his early fiction: the small-town Pennsylvania of Olinger Stories, the sandstone farmhouse of Of the Farm, the exurban New England of Couples and Marry Me, and Henr...

  • Seek My Face

    A riveting novel that takes place in one day about an elderly painter and the New Yorker interviewing her -- from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series. “A brief novel of...

  • Early Stories

    Gathering together almost all the short fiction that John Updike published between 1953 and 1975, this collection opens with Updike's autobiographical stories about a young boy growing up during the Depression in a small Pennsylvania town. There foll...



  • John Updike Audio Collection

    The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories r...

  • The Early Stories: 1953-1975

    Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction   A harvest and not a winnowing, this volume collects 103 stories, almost all of the short fiction that John Updike wrote between 1953 and 1975. “How rarely it can be said of any of our great Americ...

  • Villages

    A delightful, witty, passionate novel that follows its hero from the Depression era to the early twenty-first century -- from a master of American letters and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.John Updike’s twenty-fir...

  • The Twelve Terrors of Christmas

    Edward Goreys off-kilter depictions of Yuletide mayhem and John Updikes wryly jaundiced text examine a dozen Christmas traditions with a decidedly wheezy ho-ho-ho. 1. Santa: The Man. Loose-fitting nylon beard, fake optical twinkle, cheap red suit, fu...

  • Terrorist

    John Updike has written a brilliant novel that ranks among the most provocative of his distinguished career. Terrorist is the story of Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, an alienated American-born teenager who spurns the materialistic, hedonistic life he witnesse...

  • The Widows of Eastwick

    Eastwick - 2

    More than three decades have passed since the events described in John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick. The three divorcees--Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie--have left town, remarried, and become widows. They cope with their grief and solitude as widows ...

  • Endpoint and Other Poems

    A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book. The opening sequence, “Endpoint,” is made up of a series of connected poems writte...

  • Selected Stories

  • My Father's Tears: And Other Stories

    John Updike's first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, My Father's Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel. "Pers...

  • The Maples Stories

    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 s...

  • The Bulgarian Poetess

    The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories refl...

  • The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals

    The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories refl...

  • Snowing in Greenwich Village

    The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories refl...

  • Buchanan Dying

    To the list of John Updike’s well-intentioned protagonists -- Rabbit Angstrom, Richard Maple, Henry Bech -- add James Buchanan, the harried fifteenth president of the United States (1857"1861). In what the author calls “a kind of novel, conceiv...

  • Olinger Stories

    The first one-volume hardcover edition of the eleven autobiographical stories that were closest to Updike's heart. With full-cloth binding and a silk ribbon marker. In an interview, Updike once said, "If I had to give anybody one book of me, it w...

Award-Winning Books by John Updike

Centaur
1964 National Book Award -- Fiction
Early Stories
2004 PEN/Faulkner Award -- Fiction
In the Beauty of the Lilies
1997 Ambassador Book Award -- Fiction
Rabbit At Rest
1990 National Book Critics Circle Award -- Fiction
1991 Pulitzer Prize -- Fiction
Rabbit Is Rich
1981 National Book Critics Circle Award -- Fiction
1982 National Book Award -- Fiction (Hardcover)
1982 Pulitzer Prize -- Fiction


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

John Updike has published 64 books.

John Updike does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Olinger Stories, was published in October 2014.

The first book by John Updike, Rabbit, Run, was published in November 1960.

Yes. John Updike has 3 series.
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