School of Arts and Sciences 2000 Dean's Forum
John Updike
World-renowned novelist
Gertrude and Claudius
World renowned novelist, poet, essayist, and literary critic John Updike read from his most recent novel, Gertrude and Claudius, an imagined prequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Updike is the great contemporary chronicler of the American middle class. He is the master of four genres: novel, short story, poetry, and essay. In each, he employs his exquisitely lyrical style and remarkable intellectual engagement with America's moral and spiritual problems to probe the inner lives of families and the mundane concerns with husband, wife, child, home, and job. The author of numerous best-selling books, Updike has built a popular reputation on his work as a novelist. In his celebrated tetralogy about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, he created one of the immortal characters of American literature.
John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, PA. He was an English major at Harvard and editor of the Lampoon. The New Yorker published his first professional story in 1954 and continues to publish his poems, stories, essays, and reviews. In his most recent novel, Gertrude and Claudius, an imagined prequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet, Updike takes everything he has learned about modern familial dysfunction and masterfully applies it to Elsinore Castle. "The book," says Richard Eder of The New York Times, "illuminates questions about Shakespeare, about what a classic means and also the unexplored hills and forests that lie on either side of the path art pushes through them."
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