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Donna Seaman just came by my office to tell me that John Updike has died. From an e-mail sent by Nicholas Latimer, VP, Director of Publicity at Knopf:

It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer. He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed.

There will be an outpouring of news and tributes, of course, and I’ll gather some of those links. For now, take a moment to read Brad Hooper’s starred review of Terrorist (2006), in which Updike showed us that, even in his seventies, he still had a few tricks up his sleeve.

Update:

It was the best of Updike, it was the worst of Updike. (“Rabbit at Rest,” by Troy Patterson, Slate)

Updike was “kaleidoscopically gifted.” (“John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class Man, Dies at 76,” by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times)

He was also “almost blogger-like.” (“A Relentless Updike Mapped America’s Mysteries,” by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)

Joyce Carol Oates remembers John Updike as “always gracious, warmly funny, kind, and bemused—and of course very bright, and ardent, when it came to literature.” (“Remembering Updike,” The New Yorker)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 12:33 pm and is filed under I on the News, Writers and Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.