Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House,^[1] which has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark (shown at right), which was designed by co-founder Blanche Knopf. Many of its hardcover books later appear as Vintage paperbacks. Vintage is a sister imprint under the Knopf Publishing Group. In late 2008 and early 2009, the Knopf Publishing Group merged with the Doubleday Publishing Group to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.^[2]

History[link]

Knopf was founded in 1915 and officially incorporated in 1918, with Alfred Knopf as president, Blanche Knopf as vice-president, and Samuel Knopf as treasurer. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in addition to leading American literary trends. Samuel Knopf died in 1932. William A. Koshland joined the company in 1934, and worked with the firm for more than fifty years, rising to take the positions of President and Chairman of the Board. Blanch became President in 1957 when Alfred became Chairman of the Board, and worked steadily for the firm until her death in 1966. Alfred Knopf retired in 1972, becoming chairman emeritus of the firm until his death in 1984.

In 1923 Knopf also started publishing periodicals, beginning with The American Mercury, founded by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, which it published through 1934. Knopf also produced a quarterly, The Borzoi Quarterly, for the purpose of promoting new books.

Blanche Knopf visited South America in 1942, so the firm could start producing texts from there. She was one of the first publishers to visit Europe after World War II. Her trips, and those of other editors, brought in new talent from Europe, South America, and Asia. Alfred traveled to Brazil in 1961, which spurred a corresponding interest on his part in South America. Their son, Alfred "Pat" Jr. was hired on as secretary and trade books manager after the war. Other influential editors at Knopf included Harold Strauss (Japanese literature), Herbert Weinstock (biography of musical jargon composers), Judith Jones (culinary texts), as well as Angus Cameron, Charles Elliott, Lee Goerner, Robert Gottlieb, Ashbel Green, Carol Brown Janeway, Michael Magzis, Anne McCormick, Nancy Nicholas, Daniel Okrent, Regina Ryan, Sophie Wilkins, and Vicky Wilson. Knopf also employed literary scouts to good advantage.^[3]

A publisher of hardcover fiction and nonfiction, Knopf's list of authors includes John Banville, Max Beerbohm, Carl Bernstein, Willa Cather, Julia Child, Bill Clinton, Michael Crichton, Joan Didion, Fernanda Eberstadt, Bret Easton Ellis, Joseph J. Ellis, James Ellroy, Anne Frank, Lee H. Hamilton, Carl Hiaasen, Kazuo Ishiguro, Thomas Kean, John Keegan, Christopher Lasch, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriella De Ferrari, Cormac McCarthy, H. L. Mencken, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, P. D. Ouspensky, Christopher Paolini, Henry Petroski, Ezra Pound, Anne Rice, Dorothy Richardson, Susan Swan, Donna Tartt, Anne Tyler, John Updike, Andrew Vachss, Carl Van Vechten, James D. Watson, Edmund White and Elinor Wylie. At least 17 Nobel Prize and 47 Pulitzer Prize winning authors have been published by Knopf, though they have also passed at times on subsequently notable books.^[4]

Since its founding, Knopf has paid close attention to design and typography,^[5] employing notable designers and typographers including William Addison Dwiggins, Harry Ford, Steven Heller, Chip Kidd, Bruce Rogers, Rudolf Ruzicka, and Beatrice Warde.

Knopf published textbooks until 1988, when Random House's schools and colleges division was sold to McGraw-Hill^[6].

In 1991, Knopf revived the "Everyman's Library" series, originally published in England in the early twentieth century. This series consists of classics of world literature in affordable hardcover editions. The series has grown over the years to include lines of Children's Classics and Pocket Poets.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• Knopf Doubleday - The official website of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and its imprints.
• The Borzoi Reader Online - Knopf's official website.
• Random House Speakers Bureau - Random House's Lecture Bureau.
• Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Records, 1873-1996 at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Gautama Buddha
A statue of the Buddha from Sarnath, 4th century CE
Born	c. 563 BCE [1] Lumbini (today in Nepal)
Died	c. 483 BCE (aged 80) or 411 and 400 BCE Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh (today in India)
Ethnicity	Shakya
Known for	Founder of Buddhism
Predecessor	Kassapa Buddha
Successor	Maitreya Buddha

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Gautama Buddha or Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha (Sanskrit: सिद्धार्थ गौतम बुद्ध; Pali: Siddhattha Gotama) was a spiritual teacher from the Indian subcontinent, on whose teachings Buddhism was founded.^[2] The word Buddha is a title for the first awakened being in an era. In most Buddhist traditions, Siddhartha Gautama is regarded as the Supreme Buddha (P. sammāsambuddha, S. samyaksaṃbuddha) of our age, "Buddha" meaning "awakened one" or "the enlightened one." ^{[note 1]} Gautama Buddha may also be referred to as Śākyamuni (Sanskrit: शाक्यमुनि "Sage of the Śākyas"). The Buddha found a Middle Way that ameliorated the extreme asceticism found in the Sramana religions.^[3]

The time of Gautama's birth and death are uncertain: most early 20th-century historians dated his lifetime as c. 563 BCE to 483 BCE,^[4] but more recent opinion dates his death to between 486 and 483 BCE or, according to some, between 411 and 400 BCE.^[5][6] UNESCO lists Lumbini, Nepal, as a world heritage site and birthplace of Gautama Buddha.^[1][7] There are also claims about birth place of Gautama Buddha to be Kapileswara, Orissa^{[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]} or Kapilavastu at Piprahwa, Uttar Pradesh He later taught throughout regions of eastern India such as Magadha and Kośala.^[16][17]

Gautama is the primary figure in Buddhism, and accounts of his life, discourses, and monastic rules are believed by Buddhists to have been summarized after his death and memorized by his followers. Various collections of teachings attributed to him were passed down by oral tradition, and first committed to writing about 400 years later.

Biography[link]

Traditional biographies[link]

The primary sources for the life of Siddhārtha Gautama are in a variety of different and sometimes conflicting traditional biographies. These include the Buddhacarita, Lalitavistara Sūtra, Mahāvastu, and the Nidānakathā.^[18] Of these, the Buddhacarita is the earliest full biography, an epic poem written by the poet Aśvaghoṣa, and dating around the beginning of the 2nd century CE.^[18] The Lalitavistara Sūtra is the next oldest biography, a Mahāyāna/Sarvāstivāda biography dating to the 3rd century CE.^[19] The Mahāvastu from the Mahāsāṃghika Lokottaravāda sect is another major biography, composed incrementally until perhaps the 4th century CE.^[19] The Dharmaguptaka biography of the Buddha is the most exhaustive, and is entitled the Abhiniṣkramaṇa Sūtra, and various Chinese translations of this date between the 3rd and 6th century CE. Lastly, the Nidānakathā is from the Theravāda sect in Sri Lanka, composed in the 5th century CE by Buddhaghoṣa.^[20]

From canonical sources, the Jātaka tales, Mahapadana Sutta (DN 14), and the Achariyabhuta Sutta (MN 123) include selective accounts that may be older, but are not full biographies. The Jātaka tales retell previous lives of Gautama as a bodhisattva, and the first collection of these can be dated among the earliest Buddhist texts.^[21] The Mahāpadāna Sutta and Acchariyaabbhuta Sutta both recount miraculous events surrounding Gautama's birth, such as the bodhisattva's descent from Tuṣita Heaven into his mother's womb.

Traditional biographies of Gautama generally include numerous miracles, omens, and supernatural events. The character of the Buddha in these traditional biographies is often that of a fully transcendent (Skt. lokottara) and perfected being who is unencumbered by the mundane world. In the Mahāvastu, over the course of many lives, Gautama is said to have developed supramundane abilities including: a painless birth conceived without intercourse; no need for sleep, food, medicine, or bathing, although engaging in such "in conformity with the world"; omniscience, and the ability to "suppress karma".^[22] Nevertheless, some of the more ordinary details of his life have been gathered from these traditional sources. In modern times there has been an attempt to form a secular understanding of Siddhārtha Gautama's life by omitting the traditional supernatural elements of his early biographies.

The ancient Indians were generally unconcerned with chronologies, being more focused on philosophy. Buddhist texts reflect this tendency, providing a clearer picture of what Gautama may have taught than of the dates of the events in his life. These texts contain descriptions of the culture and daily life of ancient India which can be corroborated from the Jain scriptures, and make the Buddha's time the earliest period in Indian history for which significant accounts exist.^{[23][Full citation needed]} British author Karen Armstrong writes that although there is very little information that can be considered historically sound, we can be reasonably confident that Siddhārtha Gautama did exist as a historical figure.^[24] Michael Carrithers goes a bit further by stating that the most general outline of "birth, maturity, renunciation, search, awakening and liberation, teaching, death" must be true.^[25]

Conception and birth[link]

Exact birthplace of Gautama Buddha in Lumbini.^[1] This is a holy shrine also for Hindus, who believe Buddha is the 9th of 10 Dashavataras of Vishnu^[26]

Various sites have been identified as possible places of Gautama Buddha's birth. UNESCO lists Lumbini, Nepal as a world heritage site and birthplace of Gautama Buddha. There are other claims of Buddha's birth in Piprahwa in Uttar Pradesh, India; or Kapileswara in Orissa, India.^{[8][9][10][12][27][13][14][15]}and raised in the small kingdom or principality of Kapilavastu.^[28] According to the most traditional biography,^[which?] the Buddha's father was King Śuddhodana, the leader of Shakya clan, whose capital was Kapilavastu, and who were later annexed by the growing Kingdom of Kosala during the Buddha's lifetime; Gautama was the family name. His mother, Queen Maha Maya (Māyādevī) and Suddhodana's wife, was a Koliyan princess. Legend has it that, on the night Siddhartha was conceived, Queen Maya dreamt that a white elephant with six white tusks entered her right side,^[29] and ten months later Siddhartha was born. As was the Shakya tradition, when his mother Queen Maya became pregnant, she left Kapilvastu for her father's kingdom to give birth. However, her son is said to have been born on the way, at Lumbini, in a garden beneath a sal tree.

The day of the Buddha's birth is widely celebrated in Theravada countries as Vesak.^[30] Various sources hold that the Buddha's mother died at his birth, a few days or seven days later. The infant was given the name Siddhartha (Pāli: Siddhattha), meaning "he who achieves his aim". During the birth celebrations, the hermit seer Asita journeyed from his mountain abode and announced that the child would either become a great king (chakravartin) or a great holy man.^[31] By traditional account,^[which?] this occurred after Siddhartha placed his feet in Asita's hair and Asita examined the birthmarks. Suddhodana held a naming ceremony on the fifth day, and invited eight brahmin scholars to read the future. All gave a dual prediction that the baby would either become a great king or a great holy man.^[31] Kaundinya (Pali: Kondañña), the youngest, and later to be the first arahant other than the Buddha, was reputed to be the only one who unequivocally predicted that Siddhartha would become a Buddha.^[32]

While later tradition and legend characterized Śuddhodana as a hereditary monarch, the descendant of the Solar Dynasty of Ikṣvāku (Pāli: Okkāka), many scholars think that Śuddhodana was the elected chief of a tribal confederacy.

Early texts suggest that Gautama was not familiar with the dominant religious teachings of his time until he left on his religious quest, which is said to have been motivated by existential concern for the human condition.^[33] At the time, many small city-states existed in Ancient India, called Janapadas. Republics and chiefdoms with diffused political power and limited social stratification, were not uncommon amongst them, and were referred to as gana-sanghas.^[34] The Buddha's community does not seem to have had a caste system. It was not a monarchy, and seems to have been structured either as an oligarchy, or as a form of republic.^[35] The more egalitarian gana-sangha form of government, as a political alternative to the strongly hierarchical kingdoms, may have influenced the development of the Shramana-type Jain and Buddhist sanghas, where monarchies tended toward Vedic Brahmanism.^[36]

Early life and marriage[link]

Siddhartha was born in a royal Hindu Kshatriya family. He was brought up by his mother's younger sister, Maha Pajapati.^[37] By tradition, he is said to have been destined by birth to the life of a prince, and had three palaces (for seasonal occupation) built for him. Although more recent scholarship doubts this status, his father, said to be King Śuddhodana, wishing for his son to be a great king, is said to have shielded him from religious teachings and from knowledge of human suffering.

When he reached the age of 16, his father reputedly arranged his marriage to a cousin of the same age named Yaśodharā (Pāli: Yasodharā). According to the traditional account,^[which?] she gave birth to a son, named Rāhula. Siddhartha is then said to have spent 29 years as a prince in Kapilavastu. Although his father ensured that Siddhartha was provided with everything he could want or need, Buddhist scriptures say that the future Buddha felt that material wealth was not life's ultimate goal.^[37]

Departure and ascetic life[link]

This scene depicts the "Great Departure" of Siddhartha Gautama, a predestined being. He appears here surrounded by a halo, and accompanied by numerous guards, mithuna loving couples, and devata, come to pay homage.^[38] Gandhara art, Kushan period(1st-3rd century CE)

Prince Siddhartha shaves his hair and become an ascetic. Borobudur, 8th century.

At the age of 29, the popular biography continues, Siddhartha left his palace to meet his subjects. Despite his father's efforts to hide from him the sick, aged and suffering, Siddhartha was said to have seen an old man. When his charioteer Channa explained to him that all people grew old, the prince went on further trips beyond the palace. On these he encountered a diseased man, a decaying corpse, and an ascetic. These depressed him, and he initially strove to overcome ageing, sickness, and death by living the life of an ascetic.^[39]

Accompanied by Channa and aboard his horse Kanthaka, Gautama quit his palace for the life of a mendicant. It's said that, "the horse's hooves were muffled by the gods"^[40] to prevent guards from knowing of his departure.

Gautama initially went to Rajagaha and began his ascetic life by begging for alms in the street. After King Bimbisara's men recognised Siddhartha and the king learned of his quest, Bimisara offered Siddhartha the throne. Siddhartha rejected the offer, but promised to visit his kingdom of Magadha first, upon attaining enlightenment.

He left Rajagaha and practised under two hermit teachers. After mastering the teachings of Alara Kalama (Skr. Ārāḍa Kālāma), he was asked by Kalama to succeed him. However, Gautama felt unsatisfied by the practise, and moved on to become a student of Udaka Ramaputta (Skr. Udraka Rāmaputra). With him he achieved high levels of meditative consciousness, and was again asked to succeed his teacher. But, once more, he was not satisfied, and again moved on.^[41]

Siddhartha and a group of five companions led by Kaundinya are then said to have set out to take their austerities even further. They tried to find enlightenment through deprivation of worldly goods, including food, practising self-mortification. After nearly starving himself to death by restricting his food intake to around a leaf or nut per day, he collapsed in a river while bathing and almost drowned. Siddhartha began to reconsider his path. Then, he remembered a moment in childhood in which he had been watching his father start the season's plowing. He attained a concentrated and focused state that was blissful and refreshing, the jhāna.

Enlightenment[link]

The Buddha sitting in meditation, surrounded by demons of Māra. Sanskrit manuscript. Nālandā, Bihar, India. Pāla period.

According to the early Buddhist texts,^[42] after realizing that meditative jhana was the right path to awakening, but that extreme asceticism didn't work, Gautama discovered what Buddhists call the Middle Way^[42]—a path of moderation away from the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification.^[42] In a famous incident, after becoming starved and weakened, he is said to have accepted milk and rice pudding from a village girl named Sujata.^[43] Such was his emaciated appearance that she wrongly believed him to be a spirit that had granted her a wish.^[43]

Following this incident, Gautama was famously seated under a pipal tree—now known as the Bodhi tree—in Bodh Gaya, India, when he vowed never to arise until he had found the truth.^[44] Kaundinya and four other companions, believing that he had abandoned his search and become undisciplined, left. After a reputed 49 days of meditation, at the age of 35, he is said to have attained Enlightenment.^[44][45] According to some traditions, this occurred in approximately the fifth lunar month, while, according to others, it was in the twelfth month. From that time, Gautama was known to his followers as the Buddha or "Awakened One" ("Buddha" is also sometimes translated as "The Enlightened One"). He is often referred to in Buddhism as Shakyamuni Buddha, or "The Awakened One of the Shakya Clan."

According to Buddhism, at the time of his awakening he realized complete insight into the cause of suffering, and the steps necessary to eliminate it. These discoveries became known as the "Four Noble Truths",^[45] which are at the heart of Buddhist teaching. Through mastery of these truths, a state of supreme liberation, or Nirvana, is believed to be possible for any being. The Buddha described Nirvāna as the perfect peace of a mind that's free from ignorance, greed, hatred and other afflictive states,^[45] or "defilements" (kilesas). Nirvana is also regarded as the "end of the world", in that no personal identity or boundaries of the mind remain. In such a state, a being is said to possess the Ten Characteristics, belonging to every Buddha.

According to a story in the Āyācana Sutta (Samyutta Nikaya VI.1) — a scripture found in the Pāli and other canons — immediately after his awakening, the Buddha debated whether or not he should teach the Dharma to others. He was concerned that humans were so overpowered by ignorance, greed and hatred that they could never recognise the path, which is subtle, deep and hard to grasp. However, in the story, Brahmā Sahampati convinced him, arguing that at least some will understand it. The Buddha relented, and agreed to teach.

Formation of the sangha[link]

first teaching of the Buddha, in which the Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths to his first five disciples at Sarnath, India.

After his awakening, the Buddha met two merchants, named Tapussa and Bhallika, who became his first lay disciples. They were apparently each given hairs from his head, which are now claimed to be enshrined as relics in the Shwe Dagon Temple in Rangoon, Burma. The Buddha intended to visit Asita, and his former teachers, Alara Kalama and Udaka Ramaputta, to explain his findings, but they had already died.

He then travelled to the Deer Park near Vārāṇasī (Benares) in northern India, where he set in motion what Buddhists call the Wheel of Dharma by delivering his first sermon to the five companions with whom he had sought enlightenment. Together with him, they formed the first saṅgha: the company of Buddhist monks.

All five become arahants, and within the first two months, with the conversion of Yasa and fifty four of his friends, the number of such arahants is said to have grown to 60. The conversion of three brothers named Kassapa followed, with their reputed 200, 300 and 500 disciples, respectively. This swelled the sangha to more than 1,000.

Travels and teaching[link]

Buddha with his protector Vajrapani, Gandhāra, 2nd century CE, Ostasiatische Kunst Museum

Viṣṇu as Buddha making gesture of dharmacakrapravartana flanked by two disciples

For the remaining 45 years of his life, the Buddha is said to have traveled in the Gangetic Plain, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and southern Nepal, teaching a diverse range of people: from nobles to outcaste street sweepers, murderers such as Angulimala, and cannibals such as Alavaka. From the outset, Buddhism was equally open to all races and classes, and had no caste structure, as was the rule in Hinduism. Although the Buddha's language remains unknown, it's likely that he taught in one or more of a variety of closely related Middle Indo-Aryan dialects, of which Pali may be a standardization.

The sangha traveled through the subcontinent, expounding the dharma. This continued throughout the year, except during the four months of the vassana rainy season when ascetics of all religions rarely traveled. One reason was that it was more difficult to do so without causing harm to animal life. At this time of year, the sangha would retreat to monasteries, public parks or forests, where people would come to them.

The first vassana was spent at Varanasi when the sangha was formed. After this, the Buddha kept a promise to travel to Rajagaha, capital of Magadha, to visit King Bimbisara. During this visit, Sariputta and Maudgalyayana were converted by Assaji, one of the first five disciples, after which they were to become the Buddha's two foremost followers. The Buddha spent the next three seasons at Veluvana Bamboo Grove monastery in Rajagaha, capital of Magadha.

Upon hearing of his son's awakening, Suddhodana sent, over a period, ten delegations to ask him to return to Kapilavastu. On the first nine occasions, the delegates failed to deliver the message, and instead joined the sangha to become arahants. The tenth delegation, led by Kaludayi, a childhood friend of Gautama's (who also became an arahant), however, delivered the message.

Now two years after his awakening, the Buddha agreed to return, and made a two-month journey by foot to Kapilavastu, teaching the dharma as he went. At his return, the royal palace prepared a midday meal, but the sangha was making an alms round in Kapilavastu. Hearing this, Suddhodana approached his son, the Buddha, saying:

"Ours is the warrior lineage of Mahamassata, and not a single warrior has gone seeking alms"

The Buddha is said to have replied:

"That is not the custom of your royal lineage. But it is the custom of my Buddha lineage. Several thousands of Buddhas have gone by seeking alms"

Buddhist texts say that Suddhodana invited the sangha into the palace for the meal, followed by a dharma talk. After this he is said to have become a sotapanna. During the visit, many members of the royal family joined the sangha. The Buddha's cousins Ananda and Anuruddha became two of his five chief disciples. At the age of seven, his son Rahula also joined, and became one of his ten chief disciples. His half-brother Nanda also joined and became an arahant.

Of the Buddha's disciples, Sariputta, Maudgalyayana, Mahakasyapa, Ananda and Anuruddha are believed to have been the five closest to him. His ten foremost disciples were reputedly completed by the quintet of Upali, Subhoti, Rahula, Mahakaccana and Punna.

In the fifth vassana, the Buddha was staying at Mahavana near Vesali when he heard news of the impending death of his father. He is said to have gone to Suddhodana and taught the dharma, after which his father became an arahant.

The king's death and cremation was to inspire the creation of an order of nuns. Buddhist texts record that the Buddha was reluctant to ordain women. His foster mother Maha Pajapati, for example, approached him, asking to join the sangha, but he refused. Maha Pajapati, however, was so intent on the path of awakening that she led a group of royal Sakyan and Koliyan ladies, which followed the sangha on a long journey to Rajagaha. In time, after Ananda championed their cause, the Buddha is said to have reconsidered and, five years after the formation of the sangha, agreed to the ordination of women as nuns. He reasoned that males and females had an equal capacity for awakening. But he gave women additional rules (Vinaya) to follow.

Devadatta tries to attack the Buddha. Picture of a wallpainting in a Laotian monastery.

Assassination attempts[link]

According to colorful legends, even during the Buddha's life the sangha was not free of dissent and discord. For example, Devadatta, a cousin of Gautama who became a monk but not an arahant, more than once tried to kill him.

Initially, Devadatta is alleged to have often tried to undermine the Buddha. In one instance, according to stories, Devadatta even asked the Buddha to stand aside and let him lead the sangha. When this failed, he is accused of having three times tried to kill his teacher. The first attempt is said to have involved him hiring a group of archers to shoot the awakened one. But, upon meeting the Buddha, they laid down their bows and instead became followers. A second attempt is said to have involved Devadatta rolling a boulder down a hill. But this hit another rock and splintered, only grazing the Buddha's foot. In the third attempt, Devadatta is said to have got an elephant drunk and set it loose. This ruse also failed.

After his lack of success at homicide, Devadatta is said to have tried to create a schism in the sangha, by proposing extra restrictions on the vinaya. When the Buddha again prevailed, Devadatta started a breakaway order. At first, he managed to convert some of the bhikkhus, but Sariputta and Maudgalyayana are said to have expounded the dharma so effectively that they were won back.

Mahaparinirvana[link]

The Buddha's entry into Parinirvana. Sanskrit manuscript. Nālandā, Bihar, India. Pāla period.

The sharing of the relics of the Buddha, Zenyōmitsu-Temple Museum, Tokyo

According to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta of the Pali canon, at the age of 80, the Buddha announced that he would soon reach Parinirvana, or the final deathless state, and abandon his earthly body. After this, the Buddha ate his last meal, which he had received as an offering from a blacksmith named Cunda. Falling violently ill, Buddha instructed his attendant Ānanda to convince Cunda that the meal eaten at his place had nothing to do with his passing and that his meal would be a source of the greatest merit as it provided the last meal for a Buddha.^[46] Mettanando and von Hinüber argue that the Buddha died of mesenteric infarction, a symptom of old age, rather than food poisoning.^[47] The precise contents of the Buddha's final meal are not clear, due to variant scriptural traditions and ambiguity over the translation of certain significant terms; the Theravada tradition generally believes that the Buddha was offered some kind of pork, while the Mahayana tradition believes that the Buddha consumed some sort of truffle or other mushroom. These may reflect the different traditional views on Buddhist vegetarianism and the precepts for monks and nuns.

Ananda protested the Buddha's decision to enter Parinirvana in the abandoned jungles of Kuśināra (present-day Kushinagar, India) of the Malla kingdom. Buddha, however, is said to have reminded Ananda how Kushinara was a land once ruled by a righteous wheel-turning king that resounded with joy:

44. Kusavati, Ananda, resounded unceasingly day and night with ten sounds—the trumpeting of elephants, the neighing of horses, the rattling of chariots, the beating of drums and tabours, music and song, cheers, the clapping of hands, and cries of "Eat, drink, and be merry!"

The Buddha then asked all the attendant Bhikkhus to clarify any doubts or questions they had. They had none. According to Buddhist scriptures, he then finally entered Parinirvana. The Buddha's final words are reported to have been: "All composite things pass away. Strive for your own liberation with diligence." His body was cremated and the relics were placed in monuments or stupas, some of which are believed to have survived until the present. For example, The Temple of the Tooth or "Dalada Maligawa" in Sri Lanka is the place where what some believe to be the relic of the right tooth of Buddha is kept at present.

According to the Pāli historical chronicles of Sri Lanka, the Dīpavaṃsa and Mahāvaṃsa, the coronation of Aśoka (Pāli: Asoka) is 218 years after the death of Buddha. According to two textual records in Chinese (十八部論 and 部執異論), the coronation of Aśoka is 116 years after the death of Buddha. Therefore, the time of Buddha's passing is either 486 BCE according to Theravāda record or 383 BCE according to Mahayana record. However, the actual date traditionally accepted as the date of the Buddha's death in Theravāda countries is 544 or 543 BCE, because the reign of Aśoka was traditionally reckoned to be about 60 years earlier than current estimates.

At his death, the Buddha is famously believed to have told his disciples to follow no leader. Mahakasyapa was chosen by the sangha to be the chairman of the First Buddhist Council, with the two chief disciples Maudgalyayana and Sariputta having died before the Buddha.

Physical characteristics[link]

Gandhāran depiction of the Buddha from Hadda, Central Asia. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

An extensive and colorful physical description of the Buddha has been laid down in scriptures. A kshatriya by birth, he had military training in his upbringing, and by Shakyan tradition was required to pass tests to demonstrate his worthiness as a warrior in order to marry. He had a strong enough body to be noticed by one of the kings and was asked to join his army as a general. He is also believed by Buddhists to have "the 32 Signs of the Great Man".

The Brahmin Sonadanda described him as "handsome, good-looking, and pleasing to the eye, with a most beautiful complexion. He has a godlike form and countenance, he is by no means unattractive."(D,I:115).

"It is wonderful, truly marvellous, how serene is the good Gotama's appearance, how clear and radiant his complexion, just as the golden jujube in autumn is clear and radiant, just as a palm-tree fruit just loosened from the stalk is clear and radiant, just as an adornment of red gold wrought in a crucible by a skilled goldsmith, deftly beaten and laid on a yellow-cloth shines, blazes and glitters, even so, the good Gotama's senses are calmed, his complexion is clear and radiant." (A,I:181)

A disciple named Vakkali, who later became an arahant, was so obsessed by Buddha's physical presence that the Buddha is said to have felt impelled to tell him to desist, and to have reminded him that he should know the Buddha through the Dhamma and not through physical appearances.

Although there are no extant representations of the Buddha in human form until around the 1st century CE (see Buddhist art), descriptions of the physical characteristics of fully enlightened buddhas are attributed to the Buddha in the Digha Nikaya's Lakkhaṇa Sutta (D,I:142).^[48] In addition, the Buddha's physical appearance is described by Yasodhara to their son Rahula upon the Buddha's first post-Enlightenment return to his former princely palace in the non-canonical Pali devotional hymn, Narasīha Gāthā ("The Lion of Men").^[49]

Among the 32 main characteristics it is mentioned that Buddha has blue eyes.^[50]

Teachings[link]

Reclining Buddha in Jade Temple, Shanghai

Some scholars believe that some portions of the Pali Canon and the Āgamas contain the actual substance of the historical teachings (and possibly even the words) of the Buddha.^[51][52] Some scholars believe the Pali Canon and the Agamas pre-date the Mahāyāna sūtras.^[53] The scriptural works of Early Buddhism precede the Mahayana works chronologically, and are treated by many Western scholars as the main credible source for information regarding the actual historical teachings of Gautama Buddha. However, some scholars do not think that the texts report on historical events.^{[54][dubious – discuss][55][56]}

Some of the fundamentals of the teachings attributed to Gautama Buddha are:

• The Four Noble Truths: that suffering is an ingrained part of existence; that the origin of suffering is craving for sensuality, acquisition of identity, and annihilation; that suffering can be ended; and that following the Noble Eightfold Path is the means to accomplish this.
• The Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.
• Dependent origination: the mind creates suffering as a natural product of a complex process.
• Rejection of the infallibility of accepted scripture: Teachings should not be accepted unless they are borne out by our experience and are praised by the wise. See the Kalama Sutta for details.
• Anicca (Sanskrit: anitya): That all things that come to be have an end.
• Dukkha (Sanskrit: duḥkha): That nothing which comes to be is ultimately satisfying.
• Anattā (Sanskrit: anātman): That nothing in the realm of experience can really be said to be "I" or "mine".
• Nibbāna (Sanskrit: Nirvāna): It is possible for sentient beings to realize a dimension of awareness which is totally unconstructed and peaceful, and end all suffering due to the mind's interaction with the conditioned world.

However, in some Mahayana schools, these points have come to be regarded as more or less subsidiary. There is disagreement amongst various schools of Buddhism over more complex aspects of what the Buddha is believed to have taught, and also over some of the disciplinary rules for monks.

According to tradition, the Buddha emphasized ethics and correct understanding. He questioned everyday notions of divinity and salvation. He stated that there is no intermediary between mankind and the divine; distant gods are subjected to karma themselves in decaying heavens; and the Buddha is only a guide and teacher for beings who must tread the path of Nirvāṇa (Pāli: Nibbāna) themselves to attain the spiritual awakening called bodhi and understand reality. The Buddhist system of insight and meditation practice is not claimed to have been divinely revealed, but to spring from an understanding of the true nature of the mind, which must be discovered by treading the path guided by the Buddha's teachings.

Other religions[link]

Buddha depicted as the 9th Avatar of god Vishnu in a traditional Hindu representation.

In Hinduism, Gautama is regarded as one of the ten avatars of God Vishnu. Some Hindu texts say that the Buddha was an avatar of the god Vishnu.^[26]

The Buddha is also regarded as a prophet by the Ahmadiyyas^[57][58][59] and a Manifestation of God in the Bahá'í faith.^[60] Some early Chinese Taoist-Buddhists thought the Buddha to be a reincarnation of Lao Tzu.^[61]

The Christian Saint Josaphat is based on the life of the Buddha. The name comes from the Sanskrit Bodhisatva via Arabic Būdhasaf and Georgian Iodasaph.^[62] The only story in which St. Josaphat appears, Barlaam and Josaphat, is based on the life of the Buddha.^[63] Josaphat was included in earlier editions of the Roman Martyrology (feast day 27 November) — though not in the Roman Missal — and in the Eastern Orthodox Church liturgical calendar (26 August).

Depiction in arts and media[link]

Films

• Little Buddha, a 1994 film by Bernardo Bertolucci
• Prem Sanyas, a 1925 silent film, directed by Franz Osten and Himansu Rai

Books

• The Light of Asia, an 1879 book by Edwin Arnold
• Siddhartha (novel), a 1922 book by Hermann Hesse

See also[link]

References[link]

Notes

1. ^ Turner, Sir Ralph Lilley (1962–1985). "buddha 9276". A comparative dictionary of the Indo-Aryan languages. London: Oxford University Press. Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, University of Chicago. p. 525. http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/contextualize.pl?p.2.soas.1976481. Retrieved 22 February 2010. "Hypothetical root budh "perceive" 1. Pali buddha – "understood, enlightened", masculine "the Buddha"; Aśokan (the language of the Inscriptions of Aśoka) Budhe nominative singular; Prakrit buddha – ‘ known, awakened ’; Waigalī būdāī, "truth"; Bashkarīk budh "he heard"; Tōrwālī būdo preterite of bū, "to see, know" from bṓdhati; Phalūṛa búddo preterite of buǰǰ , "to understand" from búdhyatē; Shina Gilgitī dialect budo, "awake"; Gurēsī dialect budyōnṷ intransitive "to wake"; Kashmiri bọ̆du, "quick of understanding (especially of a child)"; Sindhī ḇudho, past participle (passive) of ḇujhaṇu, "to understand" from búdhyatē, West Pahāṛī buddhā, preterite of bujṇā, "to know"; Sinhalese buj (j written for d), budu, bud, but, "the Buddha"." 

References

Further reading[link]

• Ambedkar, B.R. (1957). The Buddha and His Dhamma. Bombay: People's Education Society. 
• Armstrong, Karen (2001). Buddha. New York: Penguin Books. 
• Bechert, Heinz, ed. (1996). When Did the Buddha Live? The Controversy on the Dating of the Historical Buddha. Delhi: Sri Satguru. 
• Conze, Edward, trans. (1959). Buddhist Scriptures. London: Penguin Books. 
• Ñāṇamoli, Bhikku (1992). The Life of the Buddha According to the Pali Canon (3rd ed.). Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society. 
• Ortner, Jon (2003). Buddha. New York: Welcome Books. 
• Rahula, Walpola (1974). What the Buddha Taught (2nd ed.). New York: Grove Press. 
• Reps, Paul; Senzaki, Nyogen (1957). Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings. New York: Doubleday. 
• Robinson, Richard H.; Johnson, Willard L.; Wawrytko, Sandra A.; DeGraff, Geoffrey (1996). The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.. 
• Sathe, Shriram (1987). Dates of the Buddha. Hyderabad: Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Samiti. 
• Senzaki, Nyogen; McCandless, Ruth Strout (1953). Buddhism and Zen. New York: Philosophical Library. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gautama Buddha

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Gautama Buddha

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Gautama Buddha

• Buddha on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)
• A sketch of the Buddha's Life
• Critical Resources: Buddha and Buddhism
• What Was The Buddha Like? by Ven S. Dhammika

Dan Chiasson (born in Burlington, Vermont) is an American poet, critic and professor.

Life[link]

He graduated from Amherst College^[1] and Harvard University, with a Ph.D in English.

He is currently an associate professor at Wellesley College. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.^[2]

His work appeared in AGNI,^[3] The New Yorker,^[4] The New York Review of Books,^[5] He and Meghan O'Rourke are co-poetry editors of the Paris Review.^[6] His poems have been translated into German by Jan Wagner, the selected poems have been published as "Naturgeschichte" at luxbooks, a publishing house focused on American poetry in bilingual editions.

He is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.^[7]

Honors and awards[link]

• 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry ^[8][9]
• Pushcart Prize
• 2004 Whiting Writers' Award

Published works[link]

• "Swifts", Slate, July 29, 2008
• "Vermont", AGNI
• "Here Follows an Account of the Nature of Birds", Paris Review

Collections[link]

• The Afterlife of Objects. University of Chicago Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0-226-10378-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=lBJharNOZ1QC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Dan+Chiasson#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Natural History: Poems. Random House, Inc.. 2007. ISBN 978-0-375-71115-2. http://books.google.com/books?id=_Qss-s8ZdEIC&dq=Dan+Chiasson&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=C5kHNpfj1a&sig=Tv4EU1IhVC6tYbW-Dv0BHOpopK4&hl=en&ei=p7-rSv3jPIrUM8Wd3fIN&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Where's the Moon, There's the Moon: Poems. Random House Inc. 2010. ISBN 978-0-307-27217-1. 

Anthologies[link]

• H.L. Hix, ed. (2008). New Voices: Contemporary Poetry from the United States. Irish Pages. ISBN 978-0-9544257-9-1. 

Criticism[link]

• "The Anne Winters Challenge", Slate, Nov. 29, 2004
• One Kind of Everything:Poem and Person in Contemporary America. University of Chicago Press. 2007. ISBN 978-0-226-10381-5. 
• The fidgets of remembrance: three reflections on Robert Lowell's late poetry. Amherst College. 1993. 

References[link]

External links[link]

• "This Mere Guy", Guernica, October 2006
• "Q&A: Dan Chiasson Chooses Carefully", Poets & Writers
• "Dan Chiasson on C.P. Cavafy, Newly Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn", Band of Thebes
• Dan Chiasson interviewed by Christopher Lydon, "Whose Words These Are," Radio Open Source, 27 May 2010
• "Amherst Poets Dream Date: Interview with Dan Chiasson" by Josh Jacobs, September 2011

John Updike
Born	(1932-03-18)March 18, 1932 Reading, Pennsylvania, United States
Died	January 27, 2009(2009-01-27) (aged 76)[1] Danvers, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	novelist, short story writer, literary critic
Genres	Literary realism
Notable work(s)	Rabbit Angstrom novels Henry Bech stories The Witches of Eastwick
Influences Ernest Hemingway, Henry Green, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Joyce, Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, Karl Barth, William Shakespeare, James Thurber[2]
Influenced Ann Beattie, David Foster Wallace, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Nicholson Baker, Ian McEwan, Rick Moody, Joseph O'Neill, Ethan Canin, Martin Amis, Lloyd Kropp, Ceridwen Dovey, David Baddiel, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Ford, T. Coraghessan Boyle[3]
Signature

John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009^[1]) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.

Updike's most famous work is his Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and the novella "Rabbit Remembered"), which chronicles Rabbit's life over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.

Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike was well recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolificness. He wrote on average a book a year. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity."^[4] His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans; its emphasis on Christian theology; and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted a significant amount of critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time.^[5] Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice" that extravagantly describes the physical world, while remaining squarely in the realist tradition.^[6] He famously described his own style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due."^[7]

Early life and education[link]

Updike was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike and Linda Grace Hoyer in Reading, Pennsylvania and grew up in the nearby small town Shillington.^[8] The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to be a published writer influenced the young Updike's own aspirations. He later recalled how his mother's writing inspired him as a child. "One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk ... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in — and come back in."^[9]

These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories.^[10] He graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and subsequently attended Harvard after receiving a full scholarship. At Harvard, he soon became widely known among his classmates as an extremely talented and prolific contributor to the Harvard Lampoon, of which he served as president, before graduating summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English.^[10]

After graduation, he decided to become a graphic artist and attended The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. His early ambition was to be a cartoonist.^[11] After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This was the beginning of his writing career.^[10]

Career as a writer[link]

Updike stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories that came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959). These works were influenced by Updike's early engagement with The New Yorker.^[10] This early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger ("A&P"), John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"), and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.^[10]

During this time, Updike also underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction.^[10] Updike remained a believing Christian for the rest of his life.^[12]

Later, Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. Many commentators, including a columnist in the local Ipswich Chronicle, asserted that the fictional town of Tarbox in Couples was based on Ipswich. Updike denied the suggestion in a letter to the paper.^[13] Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich during the 1960s and 1970s are included in a letter to the same paper published soon after Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary.^[14] In Ipswich, Updike wrote Rabbit, Run (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and The Centaur (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the National Book Award.^[15]

Rabbit, Run featured Rabbit Angstrom, a former high school basketball star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and critically acclaimed character. Updike wrote three additional novels about him. Rabbit, Run was featured in Time's All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.^[16]

Updike's career and reputation were nurtured and expanded by his long association with The New Yorker, which published him frequently throughout his lifetime of writing, despite the fact that he had departed the magazine's employment after only two years. The New Yorker, particularly in the 1930s through the 1980s, reached a wide and literate audience with emphasis on writers, artists and thinkers on the east coast, where most of its readers also resided. The magazine was for many decades one of the preeminent publishing forums for the American short story, a genre at which Updike excelled, and it continued to publish shorter fiction long after many other publications had ceased to express any interest. Until the 1960s, there were dozens of popular magazines which published short fiction. As magazines directed their attention to "targeted" or special interest audiences of prime interest to advertisers, short fiction began to fall by the wayside. As the number of venues declined rapidly, the importance of appearing in The New Yorker rose. Updike's short story output found a welcome home at The New Yorker, which, in turn, introduced him to a wide and alert reading public.

In 1971, Updike published a sequel to Rabbit, Run called Rabbit Redux, his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's confusion and ambivalence towards the social and political changes that beset the United States during that time.^[17] In 1980 he published another novel featuring that character, Rabbit Is Rich, which won the National Book Award,^[18] the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction--all three major American literary prizes. The novel found "Rabbit the fat and happy owner of a Toyota dealership."^[10] Updike found it difficult to end the book, because he was "having so much fun" in the imaginary county Rabbit and his family inhabited.^[17] In 1990, he published the last Rabbit novel, Rabbit At Rest, in which his main character died. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long, the novel is among Updike's most celebrated. In 2000, Updike included the novella "Rabbit Remembered" in his collection Licks of Love, drawing a final close to the Rabbit saga. His Pulitzers for the two final Rabbit novels make him one of only three writers to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, the other two being William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington.

In 1995, Everyman's Library collected and canonized the four novels as the omnibus Rabbit Angstrom, for which Updike wrote an introduction in which he described Rabbit as "a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight."^[19] Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer."^[20]

Updike's early Olinger period was set in the Pennsylvania of his youth; it ended around 1965 with the lyrical Of the Farm. After his early novels, Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America, and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores.^[21] He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." The most prominent of Updike's novels of this vein is Couples (1968), a novel about adultery in a small fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox. It garnered Updike an appearance on the cover of Time magazine with the headline "The Adulterous Society." Both the magazine article and, to an extent, the novel struck a chord of national concern over whether American society was abandoning all social standards of conduct in sexual matters.

The Maple short stories, collected in Too Far To Go (1979), reflected the ebb and flow of Updike's first marriage; "Separating" (1974) and "Here Come the Maples" (1976) related to Updike's divorce. Those stories were the basis for the television movie also called Too Far To Go, broadcast by NBC in 1979. Two other novels from this period, A Month of Sundays (1975), the first in Updike's so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, and Marry Me: A Romance (1976), are also meditations on suburban adultery.^[10]

The Coup (1978), a lauded novel about an African dictatorship inspired by a visit he made to Africa, found Updike working in new territory. After writing Rabbit is Rich, Updike published The Witches of Eastwick (1984), a playful novel about witches living in Rhode Island. He described it as an attempt to "make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors."^[22] One of Updike's most popular novels, it was adapted as a film and included on Harold Bloom's list of canonical 20th-century literature (in The Western Canon).^[23] In 2008 Updike published The Widows of Eastwick, a return to the witches in their old age. It was his last published novel.

In 1986 he published the unconventional novel Roger's Version, the second volume of the so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, about an attempt to prove God's existence using a computer program. Author and critic Martin Amis called it a "near-masterpiece."^[24] The novel S. (1989), uncharacteristically featuring a female protagonist, concluded Updike's reworking of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.^[10]

Updike enjoyed working in series; in addition to the Rabbit novels and the Maples stories, a recurrent Updike alter ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist and eventual Nobel laureate Henry Bech, chronicled in three comic short-story cycles: Bech, a Book (1970), Bech Is Back (1981) and Bech At Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). These stories were compiled as The Complete Henry Bech (2001) by Everyman's Library. Bech is a comical and self-conscious antithesis of Updike's own literary persona: Jewish, a World War II veteran, reclusive, and unprolific to a fault.^[25]

After the publication of the Pulitzer-winning Rabbit at Rest, Updike spent the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s publishing novels in a wide range of genres; the work of this period was frequently experimental in nature.^[10] These styles included the historical fiction of Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), the magical realism of Brazil (1994), the science fiction of Toward the End of Time (1997), the postmodernism of Gertrude and Claudius (2000), and the experimental fiction of Seek My Face (2002).

In the midst of these, he wrote what was for him a more conventional novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a historical saga spanning several generations and exploring themes of religion and cinema in America. It is considered the most successful novel of Updike's late career.^[10] Some critics have predicted that the novel may be considered by posterity to be a "late masterpiece overlooked or praised by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by another generation",^[26] while others thought it overlong and depressing. In Villages (2004), Updike returned to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England. His twenty-second novel, Terrorist (2006), the story of a fervent young extremist Muslim in New Jersey, garnered media attention but little critical praise.^[10]

In 2003, Updike published The Early Stories, a large collection of his short fiction spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. More than 800 pages long, with over one hundred stories, it has been called "a richly episodic and lyrical Bildungsroman . . . in which Updike traces the trajectory from adolescence, college, married life, fatherhood, separation and divorce."^[10] It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004.^[27] This lengthy volume nevertheless excluded several stories found in his short-story collections of the same period.

Updike worked in a wide array of genres, including fiction, poetry (most of it compiled in Collected Poems: 1953-1993, 1993), essays (collected in nine separate volumes), a play (Buchanan Dying, 1974), and a memoir (Self-Consciousness, 1989).

Updike won an array of awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, both the 1989 National Medal of Arts and 2003 National Humanities Medal, and the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Updike to present the 2008 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government's highest humanities honor; Updike's lecture was entitled "The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art."^[28][29]

Marriages and family[link]

Updike married Mary E. Pennington, an art student at Radcliffe College, in 1953. She accompanied him to Oxford, England, where he attended art school and where their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. The couple had three more children together: writer David (born 1957), Michael (born 1959) and Miranda (born 1960); Updike and Pennington divorced in 1974. Updike had seven grandchildren: Trevor Leonard Updike and Sawyer Michael Updike, Michael's sons; John Anoff Cobblah and Michael Kwame Cobblah, Elizabeth's sons; Kai Daniels Freyleue and Seneca Dunn Freyleue, Miranda's sons; and Wesley Updike, David's son.

In 1977 Updike married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, with whom he lived in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts until his death of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.^[30]

Poetry[link]

Updike published eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his first book The Carpentered Hen (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous Endpoint (2009). The New Yorker published excerpts of Endpoint in its March 16, 2009 issue. Much of Updike's poetical output was recollected in Knopf's Collected Poems (1993). He wrote that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form."^[31] The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike was such a well-known novelist, his poetry "could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of "epigrammatical lucidity."^[32] His poetry has been praised for its engagement with "a variety of forms and topics," its "wit and precision," and for its depiction of topics familiar to American readers.^[31]

British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for the metaphysical quality of his poetry and for his ability "to make the ordinary seem strange," and calls Updike one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry.^[33] Reading Endpoint aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found "another, deeper music" in Updike's poetry. He finds that Updike's wordplay "smoothes and elides itself", and has many subtle "sound effects."^[34] John Keenan, who praised the collection Endpoint as "beautiful and poignant", notes that his poetry's engagement with "the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him."^[35] It is possible that the literary establishment was unwilling to concede that a writer could do both poetry and fiction well.

Literary criticism and art criticism[link]

Updike was also a critic of literature and art, one frequently cited as one of the best American critics of his generation.^[36] In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:

Updike delivering the 2008 Jefferson Lecture.

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation — at least one extended passage — of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.^[37]

He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make his reviews "animated."^[38] He was also a champion for young writers, often making generous comparisons to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust.^[39] Good reviews from Updike were often seen as a significant achievement in terms of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews helped jump-start the careers of such younger writers as Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer.^[40] Bad reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy,^[41] as when in late 2008 he gave a "damning" review of Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy.^[42][43]

Updike was praised for his literary criticism's conventional simplicity and profundity, for being an aestheticist critic who saw literature on its own terms, and for his longtime commitment to the practice of literary criticism.^[44]

Much of Updike's art criticism appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote about American art.^[45] His art criticism involved an aestheticism like that of his literary criticism.^[44]

Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, "The Clarity of Things: What's American About American Art?", dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th century to the 20th.^[46] In the lecture he argued that American art, until the expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its artistic "independence", is characterized by an insecurity not found in the artistic tradition of Europe."^[28] In Updike's own words:

Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that "for the poet there are no ideas but in things." No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.^[46]

Critical reputation and style[link]

Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation.^[48] He and Toni Morrison were the most written-about living American novelists of their time.^[5] He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters", with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers.^[40] The excellence of his prose style is acknowledged even by critics skeptical of other aspects of Updike's work.^[6][49] Critics emphasize his "inimitable prose style" and "rich description and language," often favorably compared to Proust and Nabokov.^[6] Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.^[6] Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader."^[6] On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life."^[6]

Updike's character Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist of the series of novels widely considered his magnum opus, has been said to have "entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures," along with Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and others.^[50] A 2002 list by Book magazine of the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 listed Rabbit in the top five.^[51] The Rabbit novels, the Henry Bech stories, and the Maples stories have been canonized by Everyman's Library.^[52] After Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive.^[53] 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society,^[54] a group of scholars dedicated to "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works." The Society will begin publishing The John Updike Review, a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies. The John Updike Society First Biennial Conference took place in 2010 at Alvernia University.^[55]

Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean", and that Updike's death marked "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half." McEwan concluded that the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument", and describing it, concluded:

Updike is a master of effortless motion — between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, "and not chop them down to what you think is the right size".^[56]

Jonathan Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called Rabbit at Rest (1990) "one of the very few modern novels in English ... that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce, and not feel the draft ... It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."^[57]

The novelist Philip Roth, considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals,^[58] wrote that "John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne."^[50]

The noted critic James Wood called Updike "a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey."^[59] In a review of Updike's Licks of Love (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons", but that there often exists in his work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview." Wood both praises and criticizes Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract." He writes that Updike is capable of writing "the perfect sentence" and notes that Updike's unique style is characterized by a "delicate deferral" of the sentence. The beauty of Updike's language and his faith in the power of that language floats above reality, according to Wood:

For some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books – here extended a further instance – suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us – ‘life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed – and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.^[60]

In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan asserted that Updike is "intensely intellectual", with a style that constitutes his "manner of thought" not merely "a set of dainty curlicues." Karshan calls Updike an inheritor of the "traditional role of the epic writer." According to Karshan, "Updike's writing picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and child." Disagreeing with Wood's critique of Updike's alleged over-stylization, Karshan evaluates Updike's language as convincingly naturalistic:

Updike's sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust's sentences in Updike's description, they "seek out an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith." Updike aspires to "this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs." Their hesitancy and self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions and makes them if it cannot find them.^[49]

Harold Bloom once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist ... He specializes in the easier pleasures."^[61] Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays on Updike in 1987, in which he concluded that Updike possessed a major style and was capable of writing beautiful sentences which are "beyond praise"; nevertheless, Bloom went on, "the American sublime will never touch his pages."^[62]

On The Dick Cavett Show in 1981, the novelist and short-story writer John Cheever was asked why he did not write book reviews and what he would say if given the chance to review Updike's Rabbit is Rich (1981). He replied:

The reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated ... John is perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of the fact that life is — the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost, of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would have described if I could through a review.^[63]

The Fiction Circus, an online and multimedia literary magazine, called Updike one of the "four Great American Novelists" of his time along with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each jokingly represented as a sign of the Zodiac. Furthermore, Updike was seen as the "best prose writer in the world", like Nabokov before him. But in contrast to many literati and establishment obituaries, the Circus asserted that nobody "thought of Updike as a vital writer."^[64]

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing ... He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction — the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisite urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly — were both alive in him."^[26] The critic James Wolcott, in a review of Updike's last novel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), notes that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits: "Updike elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm."^[65]

Gore Vidal, in a controversial essay in the Times Literary Supplement, professed to have "never taken Updike seriously as a writer." He criticizes his political and aesthetic worldview for its "blandness and acceptance of authority in any form." He concludes that Updike "describes to no purpose." Vidal mockingly refers to Updike as "our good child", in reference to his wide establishment acclaim, and excoriates his alleged political conservatism. Vidal's ultimate conclusion is that "Updike's work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up."^[66]

Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, called Updike "one of the most elegant and coolly observant writers of his generation".^[67] The short-story writer Lorrie Moore, who once described Updike as "American literature's greatest short story writer ... and arguably our greatest writer",^[38] reviewed Updike's body of short stories in The New York Review, praising their intricate detail and rich imagery: "his eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story's way."^[68] In a post commemorating his birthday in 2011, blogger and literary critic Christy Potter called Updike "... THE Writer, the kind of writer everyone has heard of, the one whose name you can bring up at a party and people who have never read one thing he wrote will still nod their heads knowingly and say, 'Oh yes, John Updike. The writer.'"^[69]

During November 2008 the editors of the UK's Literary Review magazine awarded Updike their Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates "crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature." ^[29]

Themes[link]

The principal themes in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America^[71] as well as death.^[72] Often he would combine them, frequently in his favored terrain of "the American small town, Protestant middle class", of which he once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."^[50] For example, the decline of religion in America is chronicled in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) alongside the history of cinema, and Rabbit Angstrom contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles while the latter is giving his sermon in Rabbit, Run (1960). Critics have often noted that Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books — the Rabbit series, the Henry Bech series, Eastwick, the Maples stories — demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language.^[60] Updike's novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader, the novel endowed with theological beliefs meant to challenge the reader as the plot runs its course.^[5] Rabbit Angstrom himself acts as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith.^[10]

Sex in Updike's work is noted for its ubiquity and the reverence with which he described it:

His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.^[73]

The critic Edward Champion notes that Updike's prose heavily favors "external sexual imagery" rife with "explicit anatomical detail" rather than descriptions of "internal emotion" in descriptions of sex.^[74] In Champion's interview with Updike on The Bat Segundo Show, Updike replied that he perhaps favored such imagery to concretize and make sex "real" in his prose.^[74] Another sexual theme commonly addressed in Updike is adultery, especially in a suburban, middle class setting, most famously in Couples (1968). The Updikean narrator is often "a man guilty of infidelity and abandonment of his family."^[75]

Similarly, Updike wrote about America with a certain nostalgia, reverence, and recognition and celebration of America's broad diversity. ZZ Packer wrote that in Updike, "there seemed a strange ability to harken both America the Beautiful as well as America the Plain Jane, and the lovely Protestant backbone in his fiction and essays, when he decided to show it off, was as progressive and enlightened as it was unapologetic."^[76] The Rabbit novels in particular can be viewed, according to Julian Barnes, as "a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life."^[77] But as Updike celebrated ordinary America, he also alluded to its decline: at times, he was "so clearly disturbed by the downward spin of America."^[78] Adam Gopnik concludes that "Updike's great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful."^[26]

Updike also commonly wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation.^[72] In The Poorhouse Fair (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, "There is no goodness without belief ... And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next", demonstrating a religious, metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work. For Rabbit Angstrom, with his constant musings on mortality, his near-witnessing of his daughter's death, and his often shaky faith, death is more frightening and less obvious in its ramifications. At the end of Rabbit at Rest (1990), though, Rabbit demonstrates a kind of certainty, telling his son Nelson on his deathbed, "... But enough. Maybe. Enough." In The Centaur (1963), George Caldwell is afraid of his cancer and does not have any religious faith.^[72] Death can also be a sort of unseen terror; it "occurs offstage but reverberates for survivors as an absent presence."^[72]

Updike himself also experienced a "crisis over the afterlife", and indeed "many of his heroes shared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged he had suffered as a young man: Henry Bech's concern that he was 'a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust,' or Colonel Ellelloû's lament that 'we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten.' Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God — looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with 'its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.'"^[79] Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):

And another regrettable thing about death

is the ceasing of your own brand of magic ...^[80]

Describing his purpose in writing prose, Updike himself, in the introduction to his Early Stories: 1953-1975 (2004), wrote that his aim was always "to give the mundane its beautiful due."^[7] Elsewhere he famously said, "When I write, I aim my mind not towards New York but towards a vague spot east of Kansas."^[81] Some have suggested^[49] that the "best statement of Updike's aesthetic comes in his early memoir 'The Dogwood Tree'" (1962): "Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a colour, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm."^[82]

Cultural references[link]

• Updike was featured on the cover of Time twice, on 26 April 1968 and again on 18 October 1982.^[83]
• Updike was the subject of a "closed book examination" by Nicholson Baker, entitled U and I (1991). Baker discusses his wish to meet Updike and become his golf partner.^[84]
• In a season 12 episode of the animated series The Simpsons, "Insane Clown Poppy" (2000), John Updike is the ghost writer of a book that Krusty the Clown is promoting. The book's title is Your Shoe's Too Big To Kickbox God, a 20-page book written entirely by John Updike as a money-making scam.^[85][86]
• The main character in the Eminem film 8 Mile (2002) is nicknamed "Rabbit" and has some similarities to Rabbit Angstrom.^[87] The film's soundtrack has a song titled "Rabbit Run".
• Portraits of Updike appeared several times in The New York Review of Books, drawn by the American caricaturist David Levine.^[88]
• In an episode of the television series Gilmore Girls, "In the Clamor and the Clangor", the main characters are attending a funeral and jocularly try to guess which members of the town will be the next to die, but they quickly realize the morbidity of their conversation and regret it, especially when ominous things begin to happen to the people they speculated dying, prompting Lorelai to say, "We are The Witches of Eastwick."^[89]
• In 2009 a U.S. television series named Eastwick premiered, based (loosely) on the Updike novel.
• The second episode of the seventh season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force was titled "Rabbot Redux."^[90]

Bibliography[link]

Awards[link]

^[91]

• 1959 Guggenheim Fellow
• 1959 National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award
• 1964 National Book Award for Fiction^[15]
• 1965 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
• 1966 O. Henry Prize
• 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
• 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• 1982 National Book Award for Fiction (hardcover)^[18][a]
• 1982 Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award
• 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
• 1984 National Arts Club Medal of Honor
• 1987 St. Louis Literary Award
• 1987 Ambassador Book Award
• 1987 Helmerich Award, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
• 1988 PEN/Malamud Award
• 1989 National Medal of Arts
• 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
• 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
• 1991 O. Henry Prize
• 1992 Honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard University
• 1995 William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1995 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
• 1997 Ambassador Book Award
• 1998 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation^[92]
• 2003 National Humanities Medal
• 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
• 2006 Rea Award for the Short Story
• 2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction
• 2008 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2008 Jefferson Lecture

Notes[link]

References[link]