![]() ![]() ![]() It was Rabbit, Run that started it all, and now Radio 4 has decided to run Rabbit as its Book at Bedtime, giving listeners a chance to judge for themselves.Įventually Updike would write four novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, his suburban everyman. Whether it’s true is, of course, another question. When he died in 2009, 23 novels, countless stories, essays, and a few volumes of poetry later, the New Yorker pronounced him “one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing.” Even bearing in mind that the New Yorker had been, in essence, Updike’s house magazine for 50 years, this remains praise of an order few writers will ever achieve. This early review set the tone for what would follow, and for many years Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow were hailed as a kind of unquestioned trinity of the best modern American novelists. ![]() It singled out his stylistic achievement in particular, praising him for having created a “perfectly pitched voice for the subject”. The New York Times called it a “shabby domestic tragedy,” but also “a notable triumph of intelligence and compassion”. I n 1960, a 28-year-old writer named John Updike published his second novel, Rabbit, Run. ![]()
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