He waxes poetic of the mundane objects and artifacts of daily life; he makes heroic the vacillations and struggles of the Everyman to determine what is morally right in a constantly changing world. As Updike told Jane Howard in a
Life magazine interview, "Everything can be as interesting as every other thing. . . . An old milk carton is worth a rose. . . . The idea of a hero is aristocratic. Now either nobody is a hero or everybody is. I vote for everyone." In his
John Updike Revisited, James A. Schiff called Updike "the Vermeer of American authors." Schiff went on to explain that "Updike has created canvases worthy of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter whom he so admired. Whereas others before him satirized the values and aesthetics of middle-class life, Updike has embraced and celebrated this world, revealing its poetic beauty."
Updike won a National Book Award for The Centaur, a Pulitzer and a National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, and another Pulitzer for Rabbit at Rest. But this diverse writer has also been honored for other forms, including a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism for Hugging the Shore and an O'Henry Award for the short story "The Bulgarian Poetess," which first presented the character of Henry Bech, the fictional author and Updike alter-ego who is at the center of three short story collections, Bech: A Book, Bech is Back, and Bech at Bay.
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