John Updike interview - A digital recording of Lorene Cary's interview with the author at the Kelly Writers House. See the Writers House calendar entry for more about this event.

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." Mr. Updike was on Penn's campus for this year's School of Arts & Sciences Dean's Forum. More about his visit is available here. Writers House Webcast Archive