by John Updike
For this fresh printing, apt to be the last I shall oversee, I have tried to smooth away such inconsistencies as have come to my attention. Various automotive glitches – a front engine assigned to a rear-engine make of car, a convertible model that never existed in all of Detroit’s manufacture – have been repaired. The flora and fauna of commercial products and popular culture posed many small spelling problems that should be now resolved. Birthdays: real people have them, but fictional characters usually do without, unless an extended chronicle insists. To my best knowledge Harold C. (a mystery initial) Angstrom was born in February 1933, and Janice Springer sometime in 1936. They were married in March of 1956, and their son Nelson was born the following October, seven months later – on the 22nd, by my calculations. Nelson’s daughter, Judith, was born in January of 1980 and his son, Roy, in November of 1984. Rabbit, Run takes place from 20 March 1959 to 24 June of that year; Rabbit Redux from 16 July 1969 to late October; Rabbit Is Rich from 23 June 1979 to 20 January 1980; and Rabbit at Rest from 28 December 1988 to 22 September 1989. Spring, fall, summer, winter: a life as well as a year has its seasons.
John Updike
By John Updike
POEMS
The Carpentered Hen (1958)
Telephone Poles (1963)
Midpoint (1969)
Tossing and Turning (1977)
Facing Nature (1985)
Collected Poems: 1953 – 1993 (1995)
Americana (2001)
NOVELS
The Poorhouse Fair (1959)
Rabbit, Run (1960)
The Centaur (1963)
Of the Farm (1965)
Couples (1968)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
A Month of Sundays (1975)
Marry Me (1976)
The Coup (1978)
Rabbit is Rich (1981)
The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
Roger’s Version (1986)
S. (1988)
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Memories of the Ford Administration (1992)
Brazil (1994)
In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
Toward the End of Time (1997)
Gertrude and Claudius (2000)
Seek My Face (2002)
Villages (2004)
Terrorist (2006)
The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
The Same Door (1959)
Pigeon Feathers (1962)
Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964)
The Music School (1966)
Bech: A Book (1970)
Museums and Women (1972)
Problems and Other Stories (1979)
Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979)
Bech Is Back (1982)
Trust Me (1987)
The Afterlife (1994)
Bech at Bay (1998)
Licks of Love (2000)
The Complete Henry Bech (2001)
The Early Stories: 1953 – 1975 (2003)
My Father’s Tears (2009)
ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
Assorted Prose (1965)
Picked-Up Pieces (1975)
Hugging the Shore (1983)
Just Looking (1989)
Odd Jobs (1991)
Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (1996)
More Matter (1999)
Still Looking (2005)
Due Considerations (2007)
PLAYS
Buchanan Dying (1974)
MEMOIRS
Self-Consciousness (1989)
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Magic Flute (1962)
The Ring (1964)
A Child’s Calendar (1965)
Bottom’s Dream (1969)
A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1932 and raised in the nearby suburb of Shillington, John Updike dedicated much of his tremendous body of work to exploration of the American small town and middle class. Co-valedictorian and president of his high school class, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954 and spent a year at Oxford studying drawing and fine art at the Ruskin School. Shortly thereafter, he joined the staff of The New Yorker. He would contribute "Talk of the Town" pieces, verse, and short stories to the magazine throughout his life. In 1958, Updike’s first collection of poetry, The Carpentered Hen, was published and his fiction debut, The Poorhouse Fair, was published in 1959. His second novel, Rabbit, Run (1960) introduced Updike as a voice that would forever change American literature.
Updike authored 61 books, including more than 30 novels and short story collections, nine separate volumes of essays, a play (Buchanan Dying, 1974), a memoir (Self Consciousness, 1989), and a number of children’s books. His literary lauds include two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the 1989 National Medal of Arts, the 2003 National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Howells Medal. For more than 50 years, he lived in small towns in Massachusetts, Ipswich, Georgetown, and Beverly Farms, that inspired several of his works. Updike died in January 2009.
In the sequel to the classic Rabbit, Run, John Updike revisits Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom at a point of personal and national crisis. Against the backdrop of the 1969 moon landing, the Summer of Love, and the Vietnam War, Rabbit struggles to keep his family together and to keep up with the fast moving tides of social change in America.
Rabbit’s life has been turned upside down. His elderly mother is dying. His wife, Janice, has left him for another man. As he tries to care for their adolescent son, Nelson, Rabbit also finds himself sheltering Jill, a wealthy teenage runaway, and Skeeter, a young, angry, African-American Vietnam vet, who have become unexpected guests in his home. Tensions build in their counter-cultural household, and as Rabbit confronts sexual liberation, civil rights, drug abuse, and the war, Brewer, Pennsylvania seems to mirror the chaotic state of his country.
Boldly confronting issues of race, class, and sex, Rabbit Redux is at once an unforgettable historical novel of the 1960s and a timeless portrait of one of the greatest characters in American literature.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright ©1971 by John Updike
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of the first chapter of this book have been published in The Atlantic and Esquire.
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74408-1
www.ballantinebooks.com
