"A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted,"" Pulitzer Prize winning John Updike mused. "While within the narrative we have many apparent choices of exit, when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens" (183). Updike life was a metaphoric house with many doors with many rooms. Some are vividly lit like the story "Rabbit, Run"" and some are dark and sad such as "Separating"." .
On January 28, 2009 a very talented artist passed away in Danvers, Massachusetts. He received thirty-one national awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Best Fiction in 1982 and again in 1991. He's devotion to his craft was steadfast and rigorous. It was said that he would wake up everyday and write for a few hours for six days a week. He never wrote under a pen name", he has always been know as the author John Updike, he's middle name Hoyer. Adam Gopnik from Humanities Magazine states, "Updike comes closest to meeting Virginia Woolf's demand that a writer's only job is to get himself, or herself, expressed without impediments.".
John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1932 but he grew up in the nearby city of Shillington where his father was a high school science teacher. He's love for writing came from his mother who was an aspiring artist and writer. At the age of thirteen, John moved to his mother's childhood home in nearby Plowville as he continued to go to school at Shillington. As he grew up, John continued to read popular fiction, mystery and most of all humor.
Mrs. Updike continued to encourage her son to read, write and draw through his childhood. John excelled tremendously through high school. He served as the student body president and graduated as co-valedictorian of Shillington High. Shortly after graduation he worked as a copy boy for the Reading Eagle Newspaper. As a copy boy John was responsible for running errands for the office and most of all for taking the carbon copies of the written stories and prepare them to be distributed for printing.
