Rabbit Is Rich

by John Updike

Overview

John Updike continues to probe the yearning frustrations and pain of suburban America in this third encounter with the Angstroms, Harry (Rabbit), Janice and their son Nelson.

Rabbit, basically decent but no intellectual, is ten years down the road from RABBIT REDUX. Updike's hero, now a middle-aged Toyota dealer, still seeks peace and contentment -- items not standard equipment in his life.

RABBIT IS RICH won the literary Triple Crown: the Pulitzer prize, American Book Award and a commendatory scroll from the National Book Critics Circle. "For Updike is now indisputable at the top of his craft. No one else using the English language over the past 2 1/2 decades has written so well in so may ways as he." (Time)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780141188553
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	05/28/2010
Series:	Rabbit Quartet , #3
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

JOHN UPDIKE was the author of more than sixty books, eight of them collections of poetry. His novels, including The Centaur, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2009.

Date of Birth:

March 18, 1932

Date of Death:

January 27, 2009

Place of Birth:

Shillington, Pennsylvania

Place of Death:

Beverly Farms, MA

Education:

A.B. in English, Harvard University, 1954; also studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England

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Excerpted from "Rabbit Is Rich"
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Copyright © 1996 John Updike.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
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What People are Saying About This

Roger Sale

Someone once said that reading a John O'Hara novel is like reading the Sears catalogue. Updike can be like that too, since once he starts on . . .the way it was, he usually goes until exhausted. So the book is too long. . . .But . . .the sentence-by-sentence writing here is, at least by Updike's lush standards, not excessive at all. . . .For me Rabbit Is Rich is the first book in which Updike has fulfilled the fabulous promise he offered with Rabbit Run and The Centaur. . . -- The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

"The reviewers seemed to be under the impression that the hero was a terrible character. It's incredible! No, I think it's the most interesting American novel I've read in quite a long time"

—Mary McCarthy, interviewed in The Paris Review

"The power of the novel comes from a sense, not absolutely unworthy of Thomas Hardy, that the universe hangs over our fates like a great sullen hopeless sky. There is real pain in the book, and a touch of awe"

—Norman Mailer, Esquire

"...An American protest against all the attempts to impress upon us the 'healthy, life-loving and comic' as our standard for novels. It is sexy, in bad taste, violent, and basically cynical. And good luck to it."

—Angus Wilson, naming three Books of the Year in the Observer

And Rabbit Redux

"Against all odds, Rabbit Redux is a sequel that succeeds; it is in every respect uncannily superior to its distinguished predecessor and deserves to achieve even greater critical and popular acclaim."

—Brendan Gill, The New Yorker

"I can think of no stronger vindication of the claims of essentially realistic fiction than this extraordinary synthesis of the disparate elements of contemporary experience. Rabbit Redux is a great achievement, by far the most audacious and successful book Updike has written."

—The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher