His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, announced the arrival of a gifted new talent. That was followed quickly by Rabbit Run, the first of the rabbit novels, chronicling the life of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom from his high school basketball exploits to what seems like his deathbed in Rabbit at Rest, the last of the quartet.

Some have said that Updike can only write about people like himself, middle or upper middle class Gentiles -- in short, Wasps. He has put that canard to rest with his three books about Henry Bech, a cranky Jewish author, someone Saul Bellow might have created. The latest Bech novel, Bech at Bay, published in 1998, has earned almost unanimous critical praise.

Some others say Updike is too concerned with sex, but that view ignores the central issue in almost all of his work: Man’s 20th century quest for something meaningful in which to believe, when organized religion has been devalued and the society is saturated with cheap, in all senses of the word, entertainment.

Although In the Beauty of the Lilies may not be his finest work, it may well be his most representative. In that novel, a clergyman early on leaves the church because he no longer believes in God as he is represented in early 19th century America. Much later, his granddaughter becomes a movie star, and the circle is completed: In place of a spiritual presence, this nation has come to worship entertainers, and even the media increasingly have descended into venerating scandal rather than hard news.

Updike himself answered criticism that he writes beautifully about not very much this way: "There is a good deal to be said about almost anything. The idea of a hero is aristocratic. Now everyone is a hero or no one is... . My subject is the American small town, Protestant middle class... . It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules... . What we need is a greater respect for reality, its secrecy, its music."

Even those who do not consider Updike a major talent agree that his style is matchless. Rachel C. Burchard has written, "There is one point on which his critics agree. His style is superb. His work is worth reading if for no reason other than to enjoy the piquant phrase, the lyric vision, the fluent rhetoric."

Updike grew up in the small Pennsylvania town of Shillington, where his mother was an unpublished writer and his father was a teacher. Updike has written about Shillington many times, in fictional and nonfiction form. It is likely that his father was the model for the young hero’s father in the affectionate novel, The Centaur.

Updike went to Harvard and then studied art at Oxford’s Ruskin School in London. When he left Oxford, he became a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.

He is a fine art critic, as his collection of art crticism shows. Just Looking, proves. A particularly readable piece in that work is Monet Isn’t Everything, a tongue in cheek look at an exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Now living in Massachusetts, Updike is the father of four children and the recipient of many awards. Among them are two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, one for Rabbit is Rich in 1982 and the second for Rabbit at Rest (the end of the series) in 1991.

Besides his fictional prowess, many consider him the rightful heir to Edmund Wilson as America’s premier literary critic.

Those who are not Updike supporters tend to criticize him for what they see as an over-emphasis on sex in his novels, especially in Couples and the Rabbit tetralogy. But after the media circus with t