John Hoyer Updike was an American writer, poet, literary critic and novelist. He was born on 18th March 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Updike was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike, a mathematics teacher and an aspiring writer Linda Grace Hoyer. Updike’s initial desire was to become a cartoonist. To pursue this goal he entered the ‘The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts’ at the University of Oxford. After completing school he returned to America where began to contribute to ‘The New Yorker’ at a regular basis marking the beginning of a remarkable writing career. Updike’s work, in general, was highly respected, his outstanding career as a poet was distinguished with successful volumes of poems which are considered to be one of his best works. Rabbit, Run, a novel of a former basketball star and his floundering marriage set in the late 1950s, was the first of what has become a series of four novels about the protagonist and his family. Together the novels form a revealing chronicle of the complex changes occurring in American culture between the 1950s and the late 1980s. Rabbit, Run is a clever subversion of an old US motif: the man on the run from the suffocating effects of society, as if a tragicomic western had lost its way and ended up trapped in southeastern Pennsylvania. But this tradition is also endlessly troped as men escaping the domestic snares of women, a tradition which Rabbit, Run cheerily joins. Listen online to free English audiobook "Rabbit, Run” on our website to experience John Updike's work.
