Word after word, line after line, paragraph after paragraph, John Updike writes a seductively perfect prose. He seems as well never to have suffered writer’s block. We have over fifty books from the man, delivered over forty years: a cornucopia of stories, novels, novellas, poems, essays, and book reviews. Updike must be the only American writer ever to combine such grace with such output, and he is easily the best American writer now alive.

Born in 1932, Updike sold his first story to the New Yorker in 1954, the same year he finished college at Harvard. Though he intended to be a cartoonist (and attended the Ruskin School at Oxford), he returned to the United States and became instead a staff writer for the New Yorker. But after two years he retired to New England — where he has been writing, largely about the suburbs and small-town America, ever since.