Prolific novelist John Hoyer Updike (1932–2009) was born on this day and raised in Shillington, Pennsylvania. An only child, he read passionately and enjoyed writing and drawing from an early age.

At Harvard, he edited the Harvard Lampoon, graduated summa cum laude, then honed his craft while on staff at The New Yorker.

“Write steadily, even shyly,” he advised, “in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.”

Updike wrote fiction about ordinary people living ordinary lives. Yet in those lives he discovered endless detail, humor, and quiet revelation.

Following his first novel, Poorhouse Fair (1959), he created his remarkable character Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom in Rabbit, Run (1960). He later continued Rabbit’s story in Rabbit Redux (1971) and in the Pulitzer Prize–winning novels Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990).

A master of short stories, essays, poetry, and criticism, Updike once observed, “How quickly we become history while trying to be news.”

L.A. Times critic Katherine Stephens said Updike “had earned an imposing stance on the literary landscape.” With skill and substance, he created precise metaphors and vivid prose. With pleasure and provocation, he captured life’s smallest moments in fiction.

“Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn,” Updike once said.

Through fiction that often reflected autobiographical elements, Updike explored the challenges of middle-class America. His characters search for meaning amid divorce, infidelity, and questionable morality.

“His prose,” praised writer Robert Peltier, “sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, does read beautifully, perhaps more beautifully than anyone writing today.”

In his 1989 memoir, Self-Consciousness, Updike reflected, “I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning.”

Perhaps that is the secret of all good work, the willingness to begin again each day, striving to do the work right, or better.