John Updike's Reading: The City Behind the Rabbit Novels
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
John Updike was born in Reading in nineteen thirty-two and grew up in Shillington, a small borough just south of the city that has since been absorbed into the greater Reading area. He attended Shillington High School, graduated as co-valedictorian in nineteen fifty, and left on a full scholarship to Harvard, where he would become an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. He never really left Berks County, though. He took it with him everywhere he went.
The Reading and Shillington of Updike's childhood run through his work like a watermark. The fictional Brewer, Pennsylvania, the mid-sized industrial city where Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom lives, works, struggles, and grows old through four novels spanning from nineteen sixty to nineteen ninety, is Reading unmistakably reimagined. The mills, the river, the surrounding hills, the sense of a manufacturing world in slow-motion decline, the white working-class neighborhoods watching their certainties erode: that is Berks County filtered through one of the twentieth century's most demanding literary intelligences.
Updike worked at the Reading Eagle as a copyboy during summer breaks in the early nineteen fifties, writing some feature pieces, absorbing the texture of the place he already knew from the inside. His mother, Linda Grace Updike, was herself an aspiring writer who never quite broke through, and watching her work at her desk was, Updike later recalled, one of his earliest memories. The ambition she modeled found a larger outlet in him.
Updike won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for Rabbit Is Rich in nineteen eighty-two and Rabbit at Rest in nineteen ninety-one. He died in January two thousand and nine. The city that shaped him has declined considerably since the prosperous postwar years he knew as a boy. Reading persists, as cities do, changed almost beyond recognition from the one Rabbit Angstrom drove his used cars through, but recognizable still.
