Acclaimed American Author Updike Dies at 76

Acclaimed American Author Updike Dies at 76
Celebrated American author John Updike, photographed here in Boston in 2004, succumbed to lung growth at a hospital near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass., on Tuesday. He was 76.



Updike poses with member National Book Award winners in 1960 in New York City. Updike was honored for his novel, "The Centaur," which was selected asthe most distinguished fiction of 1963. Also pictured: Aileen Ward and John Crowe Ransom. On the far right is Mary Stallman Douglas, of the Nashville Bann



3 Updike is shown during an interview at Boston's WBUR with host Christopher Lydon. Born in 1932 in Reading, Pa., Updike eschewed the big-city life of New York in 1957 for New England and the town of Ipswich, Mass



ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in 2000, on the move: "The real America seemed to me 'out there,' too heterogeneous and electrified by now to pose much threat of the provinciality that people used to come to New York to escape ... There were also practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange.".



Updike joined President Bush at the White House in 2003 to receive a National Humanities Medal Award.



Updike released more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s, winning virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and"Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards



signs copies of his then-newest release, "Terrorist," in Washington, D.C., in 2006. Updike's take on the protagonist of his "Rabbit" tales, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom: "To me [it's] the tale of a life, a life led by an American citizen who shares the national passion for youth, freedom, and sex, the national openness and willingness to learn, the national habit of improvisation ... He is furthermore a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important