Buchanan Dying

“An abundant, even opulent, creative act … Very often Mr. Updike’s fantastic talent for mimicry produces quite marvelous results.”—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Atlantic Monthly “Using the excuse of nineteenth-century speech, Updike has indulged his love of beautiful, ornate prose; we can sink deep into sentences balanced like mobiles and turned like pots on the wheel.”—Chicago Tribune “In the real-life figure of the too hastily judged James Buchanan … Updike has at last found vehicles for his gifts of compassion and capacity to create characters ‘in the round.’ ”—Financial Times

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.