John Updike Dies At 76

John Updike, a leading writer of his generation who chronicled the drama of small-town American life with flowing and vivid prose, wit and a frank eye for sex, died on Tuesday of lung cancer. He was 76.

About two months ago, John Updike charmed a sold-out Benaroya Hall during an appearance at Seattle Arts & Lectures. It would prove to be one of his last public speaking engagements, followed only by another talk in Los Angeles.

Updike was known to be suffering from a lingering case of walking pneumonia, but he insisted on making all four West Coast stops on a speaking tour because people already had bought tickets to hear him.

"It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning,He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed." said Nicholas Latimer of Alfred A. Knopf, a unit of Random House.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author died in a hospice in Massachusetts, the state where he lived for more than half a century, prolific in his writing of novels, short stories, essays and criticism.

Updike's stories often focused on undercurrents of tension masked by the mundane surface of suburban America, which boomed in 1960s and 1970s as his career was taking off. Ripples of sexual tension were frequent.

Although some media interviews were canceled in Seattle, Updike gave no evidence of illness during his on-stage conversation with writer David Guterson and Patty Junker, curator of modern art for the Seattle Art Museum.

Guterson, the Bainbridge Island author of "Snow Falling on Cedars," had not met Updike previously and experienced difficulty in peering behind Updike's familiar façade, both in private and on stage.

More than 800 Updike stories, reviews, poems and articles were published in The New Yorker magazine from 1954 through 2008. Many American readers strongly associated Updike with that publication.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike studied English at Harvard University, where he contributed to, and later edited, the satirical Harvard Lampoon magazine. After a year studying at Oxford, Updike moved to New York where he worked for two years on the New Yorker's staff.

In 1957 he moved his family to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a coastal town north of Boston, and later moved to nearby Beverly Farms.