Martin Amis, Updike’s only rival as a post-Nabokov virtuoso, wrote that “having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he writes.” Nicholson Baker, another scintillating miniaturist, embarked on the memoir/homage U and I despite not having read even half of Updike’s books. (Updike once said that he imagined Rabbit, Run as a movie, with the present-tense narration intended to catch the fluidity of filmic motion and the opening basketball-court scene “visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits.”) The grace of the style is such that the felt ecstasy of composition renders even descriptions of physical desolation and emotional grief intoxicating. The precision is painterly in the way of photorealism, except when it’s cinematic. Books by John Updike American novelist, short story writer and poet, internationally known for his novels RABBIT, RUN (1960), RABBIT REDUX (1971), RABBIT IS RICH (1981), and RABBIT AT REST (1990). Updikes most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run Rabbit Redux Rabbit Is Rich Rabbit At Rest and Rabbit Remembered). Even his bad writing-and the consequence of his three-pages-per-day prolificity is that there’s no shortage of it-sparks with phrases that send the heart skittering. If you count swinging Saul Bellow as a Canadian, Montreal-born, and also class Vladimir Nabokov as a transnational, all-transcending anomaly, then Updike is, line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era: meticulous, crystalline, and luminously hyperrealist, his opulent language hanging on austere forms.

Updike’s most enduring legacy exists at the level of the sentence.

John updike rabbit books in order