John Updike's Shillington: Where Rabbit Began
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
The house at one-seventeen Philadelphia Avenue in Shillington is where John Updike spent his earliest years, living here until age thirteen before his family moved to a farm nearby. Born in Reading in nineteen thirty-two, Updike would go on to become one of the most decorated American novelists of the twentieth century, winning the Pulitzer Prize twice.
He returned to southeastern Pennsylvania again and again in his writing. The small-town landscapes, the texture of ordinary middle-class life, the aspirations and disappointments of people in places like Shillington, became the raw material of a fifty-year career. He is best known for his Rabbit quartet, four novels following Harry Rabbit Angstrom from the nineteen fifties through the nineteen eighties, a portrait of one American man's life that became a portrait of the country itself. His mother was an amateur writer who encouraged him early. This neighborhood made him.
