John Updike is one of the most seminal American writers of the 20th century and one of the most prolific as well. In addition to his best-selling novels, he has written numerous poems, short stories, reviews, and essays. His writing consistently reveals stylistic brilliance, and through his engagement with America's moral and spiritual problems, his works chronicle America's hopes and dreams, failures and disappointments. Though he is an enormously popular writer, the complexity and elegance of his works have elicited growing scholarly attention. Through several hundred alphabetically arranged entries, this book provides both casual and serious readers an exceptional guide to his life and writings.

Whether the reader is seeking a novel summary, an authoritative analysis of subjects, elucidation of an allusion, or a point about Updike's life or manner of composition, the encyclopedia is indispensable. A chronology summarizes the major events in Updike's career, while an introductory essay examines his progress as a writer, from his crafted light verse and informed reviews to his innovative novels and stories. The entries that follow summarize Updike's books, describe all major characters, explain allusions, identify major images and symbols, analyze principal subjects, discuss his life and career, and draw on the most significant scholarship. Entries include bibliographies, and the volume closes with a list of works for further reading.

John Updike's Early Years first examines his family, then places him in the context of the Depression and World War II. Relying upon interviews with former classmates, the next chapters examine Updike's early life and leisure activities, his athletic ability, social leadership, intellectual prowess, comical pranks, and his experience with girls. Two chapters explore Updike's cartooning and drawing, and the last chapter explains how he modeled his characters on his schoolmates. Lists of Updike's works treating Pennsylvania, and a compilation of contributions to his school paper are included, along with profiles of all students, faculty and administrators during his years at Shillington High School.

John Updike's Early Years first examines his family, then places him in the context of the Depression and World War II. Relying upon interviews with former classmates, the next chapters examine Updike's early life and leisure activities, his athletic ability, social leadership, intellectual prowess, comical pranks, and his experience with girls. Two chapters explore Updike's cartooning and drawing, and the last chapter explains how he modeled his characters on his schoolmates. Lists of Updike's works treating Pennsylvania, and a compilation of contributions to his school paper are included, along with profiles of all students, faculty and administrators during his years at Shillington High School.

Twenty-seven critics, as well as Updike himself, provide a kaleidoscopic view of the "Rabbit" Angstrom saga in 34 reviews and essays. There is dual purpose of this collection of critical responses: first, to provide a historical view of the critical reception of all of Updike's works about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom--the four Rabbit novels and the novella Rabbit Remembered and second, to show how these reviews and articles can illuminate the reader with the range of approaches to the saga. These responses to the saga reveal the reception of each installment of the saga and how critical acclamation rose with each work. The first reviews of Rabbit, Run noted Updike's ability to redeem an ex-basketball player's ordinary life through brilliant, innovative style. Scholarly essays debated whether Rabbit was a satiric figure. Updike's sequel, Rabbit Redux, showed how, for reviewer Richard Locke "the inner surface of banal experiences" could be blended seamlessly to social unrest and war. A later critic, Irina Negrea adopted the Jean Baudrillard to critique Marshall McLuhan's optimistic vision of the global village. Reviewer Thomas R. Edwards found that Rabbit Is RichF is composed of meditations on religion, politics, and economics, with motifs intertwined. The "saga," for critic Ralph Wood showed Updike as "our finest literary celebrant both of human ambiguity and the human acceptance of it." Reviewing Rabbit at Rest, Joyce Carol Oates called it a "hugely ambitious achievement" and critic Thomas Disch proclaimed, it to be "the best large-scale literary work by an American in this century," thus "the Great American Novel."