John Updike

Please Pardon The Syncopation:

perhaps none captured the imagination of the book-reading public more than his precisely observed tales about ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings. "My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class," Mr. Updike told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine. "I like middles," he continued. "It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules." From his earliest short stories, he found his subject in the everyday dramas of marriage, sex and divorce, setting them most often in the fictional town of Olinger, Pa., which he described as "a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid." He wrote about America with boundless curiosity and wit in prose so careful and attentive that it burnished the ordinary with a painterly gleam. "He is a prose writer of great beauty," Mr. Wood wrote, "but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey." ... "wanted to get away from the staleness of Old America and the vulgarity of the new; who wanted to live beautifully in beautiful surroundings; to raise intelligent children in renovated houses in absolutely authentic rural centers." Against the grain of his calling and temperament, he strove, like the German writer Thomas Mann, for a burgherly life.