Updike revisits Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom once more in Rabbit at Rest, published in 1990. This novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Howells Medal, is a long elegy for the fifty-six-year-old character, who becomes convinced in the opening scene that "he has come to meet. . . his own death." The ending of Rabbit Is Rich, with its reference to Harry's coffin, foreshadows the subject matter of this final work in the series, and Updike wanted readers to know that Rabbit at Rest would be the final visit to the character's inner life. According to James Schiff, in John Updike Revisited, Updike published an essay "Why Rabbit Had to Go" two months before publication of the novel and encouraged publishers to use the image of a tombstone on the book's dust jacket.

Harry's heart, hardened by selfishness in the first novel, has...