John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. His novels, stories, and nonfiction collections have won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in January 2009.
He is both a superb unraveller and a super accepter of the contradictions of the world . . . we should simply be grateful that he is there with his fine, discriminatory prose * Sunday Times * A modern master, the finest writer working in English -- Ian McEwan