A Life in Letters

Twice the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for novels about Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, John Updike, though very much aware of his gifts and blessings, believed himself to be, like Rabbit, an everyman— ‘a relatively fortunate American male’—and his life a specimen life, ‘representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.’ This belief animated his more than sixty autobiographical books—fiction, poetry, collections of first-person essays and memoirs—a body of creat