Tributes to Updike, American literature's national treasure

JOHN UPDIKE was remembered today as one of the "greatest generation" of American novelists.

The 76-year-old died of lung cancer yesterday at a hospice in Massachusetts, ending a prolific output of fiction, poetry, essays, and journalism.

He was best known for the "Rabbit" novels and The Witches Of Eastwick.But the literary world today paid tribute to a man whose frankness about sex and chronicling of middle-America defined a post-war generation wrestling with feminism, sexual liberation, social mobility and the "culture wars" set off by the Vietnam war.

With Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Updike dominated American fiction for half a century. Today Roth, the last survivor of the group, called him "our time's greatest man of letters - as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer".

Roth added: "He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable."

Martin Amis described him as a prodigy and said: "John Updike must have been possessed of a purer energy than any writer since DH Lawrence. I've seen it suggested that such prodigies suffer from an enviable condition called 'pressure on the cortex'. It's as if they have within them an underground spring which is always on the point of eruption. His style was one of compulsive and unstoppable vividness and musicality."

Richard Ford, one of the next generation of America's foremost writers, said: "In America we almost seemed to take him for granted. As if there might be another writer like John come along in time. Well, there won't be."

Updike produced 50 books, 28 of them novels, as well as a stream of other work. He left a solitary childhood in small-town Pennsylvania to study at Harvard, and subsequently at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford.

When his first short story, Friends From Philadelphia, was accepted by the New Yorker he called it "the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life". It will be complete this year when his final collection of stories, My Father's Tears And Other Stories, is published. Twice awarded the Pulitzer, many critics were surprised that he had not been given the Nobel Prize.