John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Following graduation (summa cum laude) in 1954 from Harvard University, where he was an English major and editor of the Harvard Lampoon, he studied for one year on a Knox fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. On 26 June 1953 he married Mary Entwistle Pennington with whom he had four children: Elizabeth, David, Michael, and Miranda. His first marriage ended with divorce and on 30 September 1977 he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard.

Updike has long revealed that his true ambition was to be a cartoonist, if not for Walt Disney then at least for the New Yorker: "What I have become is a sorry shadow of those high hopes." Still, the beginnings of his career as a writer are associated with the New Yorker, for that magazine published his first professional story, "Friends from Philadelphia," on 30 October 1954. Following his...