John Hoyer Updike was born on 18 March 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Wesley R. Updike, a high-school mathematics teacher, and Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, an aspiring writer who finally realized her literary ambitions with the publication of the novel Enchantment (1971); her short-story collection The Predator appeared posthumously in 1990. The first thirteen years of Updike's life were spent in Shillington, Pennsylvania. In 1945 he moved with his parents and maternal grandparents to the Hoyers' eighty-acre farm near Plowville, Pennsylvania; this dislocation to a more rural area and to the sandstone farmhouse in which his mother was born provided him with the subject for his early--and some later--short fiction. Updike's early ambitions included becoming an artist for Walt Disney Studios and writing for The New Yorker.
After graduating in 1950 from Shillington High School, where he wrote for the school paper, Updike attended Harvard University on a scholarship. There he drew cartoons for, contributed fiction to, and eventually edited the Harvard Lampoon.
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