Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work. In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.” Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker ; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples . With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s. “A beautifully written, richly detailed, and warmly sympathetic portrait of a great American writer.” - Joyce Carol Oates “Adam Begley’s Updike is a model of what a literary biography should be: rich with penetrating insights not only about the life but also about the work. It will enthrall long-time Updike fans and help create generations of new ones.” - Francine Prose “Adam Begley’s careful and considerate biography illuminates all the right things about Updike, whose drama were lived both privately and publicly -- his prodigious intellect and talent, the times in which he lives, his imaginative projections of those times, and the intertwining of those threads. It’s a social history in which one man’s heart, mind, and talent came to resonate for an entire society.” - Ann Beattie “Adam Begley’s careful and considerate biography illuminates all the right things about Updike, whose dramas were lived both privately and publicly. It’s a social history in which one man’s heart, mind, and talent came to resonate for an entire society.” - Ann Beattie “’You have to give it magic,’ John Updike explained of the stuff on the page, so much of it alchemically transmuted from his own experience; here was a man who could find pounding a mailbox into the ground to be an occasion for literature. Adam Begley has done him proud, offering up Updike the man and Updike the writer in an exuberant, stunningly choreographed pas de deux.” - Stacy Schiff “A sympathetic and thorough biography. . . . The more I read about Updike, the more I wanted to go back and read Updike. - USA Today “A wonderful, wise biography, judicious and intimately revealing, and does full justice to the highly complex individual that was Updike.” - William Boyd, Daily Mail's Best Books of the Year “A hefty, thorough biography. . . . Begley does an impressive, conscientious job of marshaling evidence of Updike’s many contradictions.” - Jonathan Dee, Harper's “An insightful and meticulously researched book. . . . A sustained, very fine work of literary criticism.” - The New Republic “Begley seamlessly weaves biography and critical analysis throughout his book, much as Updike himself blurred autobiography and fiction. Updike is a monumental treatment of a towering American writer.” - The New York Observer “Honorable. . . . Updike’s exquisite words flowed, some felt, too freely and too amiably. . . . It’s one of the achievements of Begley’s book that it so acutely demonstrates how it all, in fact, didn’t come so easily. . . . Begley is a gifted literary critic.” - Dwight Garner, The New York Times “A highly literate illumination of a supremely literate human being.” - Louis Menand, The New Yorker “Begley is quiet, careful, self-effacing, and steady. . . . He amply shows us the strangeness and contradictions under the affable mask.” - Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books “Though Adam Begley’s biography is the first on the writer, it’s hard to see how it will be bettered. Thoroughly researched, written with intelligence, sympathy, and grace, it is a model of first-rat