30 May at 7pm
In conversation

31 May at 7.05pm
Channel 4 television profile and rare interview, with Ian McEwan

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Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington Pennsylvania, to a Lutheran farming family. They had little money and life was tough – when John was 13, they had to move back in with his mother's parents. Education and books were important, despite the poverty. His father worked as a teacher and a casual labourer; his mother wrote endless short stories and sent them off to magazines, at first without success, though later she would sell them fairly regularly and had a collection published in 1971. An aunt who had worked in New York bought the family a subscription to the New Yorker, and John's first ambition was to become a cartoonist.

John won a scholarship to Harvard, where he majored in English and got married. He started writing, humorously at first, fancying himself as the new Dorothy Parker. He had a poem and a short story published in the New Yorker and, after spending a year at Oxford on a Fine Art fellowship, he joined the New Yorker as a staff reporter.

Two years on, in 1957, he moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts with his wife and children, and set up as a freelance writer. He published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair in 1959. It was about ordinary people, written in vivid, colourful prose.

His follow-up 'Rabbit, Run' introduced anti-hero Harry Angstrom to the American public. This 26-year old basketball player whose career was failing, whose marriage was on the slide, and who was nervous of black people, would become Updike's most compelling fictional character.

For its time, Rabbit, Run was very frank about sex and Updike was hailed as a refreshingly modern writer. He responded with gusto, turning out more novels, reviews and articles. In 1968 Couples, a story of love and infidelity in Massachusetts, was a number one bestseller. It began the process of making Updike seriously rich – he earned half a million dollars from the film rights alone, a huge sum then.

In all, Updike has written more than 30 novels. They have included three more Rabbit novels – Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit is Rich (1981), which won the Pulitzer prize, and Rabbit at Rest (1990), in which he killed off Angstrom. The reading public was shocked by the death, and perhaps Updike was too, because in 2000 he gave them another chance to remember Rabbit in Licks of Love, a novel about Angstrom's children.

Updike's non-Rabbit novels have included The Coup, a satirical comedy about Africa, and The Witches of Eastwick, which was made into a highly successful film. He has also written volumes of poetry and criticism.

Updike's reputation and readership has gone on growing throughout his long career, and many consider him the foremost chronicler of Middle America. To some he has become an icon. His political views and opinions make him hard to categorise – he votes Democrat and is tolerant of sexual freedom, but he supported the Vietnam War and dislikes anti-establishment rhetoric. Accused by some critics of ducking the hard issues of race and social exclusion, he is praised by others for being able to write sympathetically yet unsparingly about his subjects.

He was divorced from his first wife in the mid-'70s, and remarried. He lives with his second wife near Boston, where he still writes prolifically, using three separate desks for letters, first drafts, and later drafts.

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John Updike