Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", critics recognized his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – a book a year on average.

Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity".

[3] Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice that describes the physical world extravagantly while remaining squarely in the realist tradition".

[8] Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and received a full scholarship to Harvard College, where he was the roommate of Christopher Lasch during their first year.

[8] Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine.

[8] This early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger ("A&P"); John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"); and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.

After his early novels, Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America; and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores.

In the midst of these, he wrote what was for him a more conventional novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a historical saga spanning several generations and exploring themes of religion and cinema in America.

[8] Some critics have predicted that posterity may consider the novel a "late masterpiece overlooked or praised by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by another generation",[36] while others, though appreciating the English mastery in the book, thought it overly dense with minute detail and swamped by its scenic depictions and spiritual malaise.

More than 800 pages long, with over one hundred stories, it has been called "a richly episodic and lyrical Bildungsroman ... in which Updike traces the trajectory from adolescence, college, married life, fatherhood, separation and divorce".

[40] Biographer Adam Begley wrote that Updike "transmuted the minutiae of his life" in prose, which enriched his readers at the cost of being "willing to sacrifice the happiness of people around him for his art".

[49] John Keenan, who praised the collection Endpoint as "beautiful and poignant", noted that his poetry's engagement with "the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him".

A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.

[4] On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life".

[4] Updike's character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the protagonist of the series of novels widely considered his magnum opus, has been said to have "entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures", along with Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and others.

Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity.

"[76]Jonathan Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called Rabbit at Rest "one of the very few modern novels in English ... that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce, and not feel the draft ...

It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness.

[79] In a review of Licks of Love (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons" but that there often exists in his work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview".

Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us—'life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed—and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on.

Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.

[80]In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan asserted that Updike is "intensely intellectual", with a style that constitutes his "manner of thought" not merely "a set of dainty curlicues".

According to Karshan, "Updike's writing picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and child."

Updike aspires to "this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs."

[83]The Fiction Circus, an online and multimedia literary magazine, called Updike one of the "four Great American Novelists" of his time along with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each jokingly represented as a sign of the Zodiac.

"[95] Sex in Updike's work is noted for its ubiquity and the reverence with which he described it: His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it.

[101] Adam Gopnik concludes that "Updike's great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture.

[93] In The Poorhouse Fair (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, "There is no goodness without belief ... And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next", demonstrating a religious, metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work.

Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God—looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with 'its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.

'[102]Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990): And another regrettable thing about death is the ceasing of your own brand of magic ...[103]