John Updike is one of America's most important writers, adept at both the short story and the novel, and also well-known for his criticism. He was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania and spent his early years with his parents and his mother's parents, who would be the inspiration for the fictional grandparents in stories such as The Centaur. Times were difficult for the family, which moved when John was 13 years old to a farm in Plowville, 10 miles outside of Shillington. John's father was a high school mathematics teacher who commuted with his son to the public schools of Shillington. Updike's mother read widely and wanted to be a writer, and she helped create the atmosphere in which her son's talent flourished. Updike was a good student in his small-town high school and entered Harvard on a full scholarship in 1950, majoring in English. He became editor of the Harvard Lampoon and graduated summa cum laude in 1954. He married in his junior year and sold his first short story, "Friends from Philadelphia," in 1954 to the New Yorker, launching a career that would make him one of the most prolific writers in American literature.
There are a number of elements in Updike's life that are reflected in his stories. It is less that there is a one-to-one relationship between events in his life and events in his stories than that the sort of life he leads is reflected in the interests displayed in his stories. Updike early fled from the New York literary scene. He became a staff writer for the New Yorker and lived for a time in Manhattan on Riverside Drive. In time, though, he became disillusioned with the social-literary scene in New York and feared that it would inhibit the development of his career as an author. He said that the pace of his stories could not compete with the frenetic real life of the city, so he left the magazine in 1957 and moved the family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a town an hour's drive north of Bost...