**Click here to listen to our special podcast of Bob’s interview with John Updike.**
We mark the passing of John Updike with a special rebroadcast of an interview Bob did with the writer back in June of 2006. The death of Updike came as a shock to many because his prolificacy and intense curiosity belied his age.
Bob’s interview covers a great deal of Updike’s early life and includes an in depth discussion of his most famous works, the quartet of books he wrote about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, which earned Updike two Pulitzer Prizes. John Updike died on Tuesday of lung cancer; he was 76.
Click here to read John Updike’s short stories published in The New Yorker.
Click here for a biographical and literary chronology.
He was an author’s author, I suggest, in that, outside a certain social circle of high academics and publishers and outside a certain time, say, 60s and the 70s, his work cannot be truly read simply for enjoyment. For all his finesse and his output, his style is so dry and his subjects so water-coloured, that his books have dated quite quickly. I fear that now he is dead, his status is likely to recede as quickly and dramatically as that other dean of East Coast WASPishness, Peter De Vries.
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