In the late Forties and Fifties he had discovered the joy of films, and he would go to local movie houses as often as possible, experiences which he treasured and described nostalgically. His mother moved the family from their home town of Shillington out to a farm in the countryside, which Updike described as ‘the crucial detachment of my life’. His father, a schoolteacher, is a rather shadowy figure in his accounts. He was, consciously, the product of small-town Pennsylvania and always his remarkable mother’s son. And this, I think, gave him the leitmotif of his writing life and made him the writer he became. His inspiration, he says, has been drawn from life he has always believed that ‘out there was where I belonged, immersed in the ordinary which careful explication would reveal to be the extraordinary’.

In his introduction to The Early Stories, 1953–1975, John Updike speaks candidly about his professional life. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.Available for purchase at:Apple - Audiobook (Downloadable format)Audible - Audiobook (Downloadable format)audiobooks.I have read so much Updike, so many articles, so many collections of his criticism and journalism, and virtually all his many novels, that I sometimes think I know more about his thought processes than I do about my own.

He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty-even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his-or any other-generation.

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