During the 1950s writer John Updike was widely considered one of the most promising new voices in American literature with his stories in The New Yorker and his f i r s t novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1959). He entered his maturity as a writer, ironically, with a novel about a man who resists the responsibilities that maturity entails in his 1960 novel Rabbit, Run. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the protagonist of Rabbit, Run, is a frustrated salesman nostalgic for the glory days of his youth. The novel captures not only the tension in Angstrom between the responsibilities of family life and the yearning for freedom but also the minutiae of American culture during the 1950s as experienced by a middle-class, suburban Everyman. Rabbit, Run was a tremendous success both with the reading public and with academics. In its equally popular sequels — Rabbit, Redux (1971), Rabbit Is...