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John Updike will be on campus at Penn for this year's School of Arts and Sciences Dean's Forum. The annual Dean's Forum offers the University community and the general public the opportunity to meet with leading intellectual figures that exemplify the liberal arts tradition. The Dean's Forum also recognizes outstanding undergraduate and graduate students in the arts and sciences for their academic performance and intellectual promise. Also on April 13, Mr. Updike will give a public reading at 4:30 p.m. in Room 17 Logan Hall.

John 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 deploys 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 of husband, wife, children, home, and job. The author of numerous best-selling books, his popular reputation rests primarily on his works as a novelist. In his celebrated tetralogy about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, he created one of the immortal characters of American literature. 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."