Rabbit, Run - John Updike - 1960

Rabbit, Run - John Updike - 1960

Introduction

Rabbit, Run (1960) is the first of John Updike's quartet of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a modern American anti-hero. Later books in the tetralogy are Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. Taken as a whole, the Rabbit novels illustrate the attitudes, joys, and sorrows of the twentieth-century American middle class over the course of four decades. Each written at the end of one decade, published at the beginning of the next, the novels follow Rabbit from early adulthood into old age and death. Because Updike increasingly includes historical and cultural references in each book, they also trace the trajectory of American life and the events that shape and define it over time.

Updike drew from his small-town, middle-class American upbringing as much as his adult sense of domestic claustrophobia when he sat down to write Rabbit, Run in 1959. The author was a twenty-seven-year-old husband and father when he wrote the novel, partly as a response to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which was published just two years earlier. As he explains in the introduction to Rabbit Angstrom, he believed Kerouac's book was an "instruction to cut loose," and he felt he had to demonstrate what really "happens when a young American family man goes on the road—the people left behind get hurt." In Rabbit, Run, twenty-six-year-old Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, former high school basketball star, becomes so frustrated by his dull existence as husband, father, and kitchen gadget salesman that he runs out on his pregnant wife and two-year-old son to live for a time with another woman.

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