Updike's Farewell to Rabbit.

During the 1990s several writers who came of age at mid-century published new and often provocative works. Rabbit at Rest (1996), John Updike's fourth and final installment in the saga of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom — which began with Rabbit Run (1961) and continued with Rabbit Redux (1971) and Rabbit is Rich (1981) — completes the story of the former high-school basketball star who has enjoyed the benefits and endured the emptiness of the middle-class American Dream.

The Wolfe Controversy.

Updike was also involved in literary controversy with his criticism of A Man in Full (1998), a novel by Tom Wolfe, who became well-known in the 1960s for journalistic nonfiction such as The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965) and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). His second novel, A Man in Full, continued the satire of the American middle and upper classes that he had begun in his...