This is the first comprehensive critical look at the work, career, and literary reputation of John Updike. By the age of twenty-eight, John Updike had already been published in the three major forms - novel, poem, and short story - he would continue to explore with steadily expanding skill and authority. For the next four decades his literary career would realize itself primarily in these three forms, but also in essays, reviews, and memoirs, and in resourceful commentary on his own work - the stuff of many interviews and prefaces. In this book, William H. Pritchard offers not a biography, but an insightful portrait of the writer and his work.