John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Harvard in 1954. He then studied at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford and began contributing to The New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for about two years.
His Rabbit books followed one man across thirty years: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990). He also wrote The Centaur, Couples, The Witches of Eastwick and many stories and essays. He died in Danvers, Massachusetts, in 2009.