John Updike, author of novels, poetry, essays, and criticism, died January 28. According to the New York Times, Updike succumbed to lung cancer at the Hospice of the North Shore in Danvers, Massachusetts, near his home in Beverly Farms. Born March 18, 1932 in Reading, PA, Updike graduated from high school as co-valedictorian and senior-class president and attended Harvard College on scholarship, where he wrote for and edited The Harvard Lampoon. He studied painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford before finding his first publishing success in the New Yorker. During a long and prodigious career, Updike wrote at least three pages daily, amounting to sixty books, including two Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, and The Centaur, for which he received a National Book Award. “We read fiction because it makes us feel less lonely about being a human being,” he said in a 1998 Washington Post interview. “We read about what other human beings feel—what they’re driven to do, how they often work for their own destruction, how they’re in the grip of appetites that are beyond them and they can’t control or harness.” John Updike was seventy-six.