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While his stature as a short-story writer may be perpetually overshadowed by the novelistic achievements of the Rabbit tetralogy--Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)--John Updike has exhibited a sustained mastery of the short story throughout his career. With a canon of more than two hundred stories--as well as some prose sketches that he no longer includes in his volumes of short fiction--Updike has devoted a significant portion of his career to the genre that perhaps best suits his style and narrative talents. Rachel C. Burchard contends that "Updike reaches his highest range of achievement in this medium," presenting "all of his major themes with intensity and artistic discipline more refined than that of his novels." In his Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989) Updike cites his "cartoonist's ability to compose within a prescribed space" as one of his assets as a novelist; yet, that ability may be of greater value in the confines of the short story, where his linguistic precision, his gift for metaphor, and his talent for capturing the significance of everyday incidents come together on a canvas limited in scope but rich in depth.
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