Introduction

Rabbit, Run (1960) is the first of John Updike's quartet of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a modern American anti-hero. Later books in the tetralogy are Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. Taken as a whole, the Rabbit novels illustrate the attitudes, joys, and sorrows of the twentieth-century American middle class over the course of four decades. Each written at the end of one decade, published at the beginning of the next, the novels follow Rabbit from early adulthood into old age and death. Because Updike increasingly includes historical and cultural references in each book, they also trace the trajectory of American life and the events that shape and define it over time.

Updike drew from his small-town, middle-class American upbringing as much as his adult sense of domestic claustrophobia when he sat down to...