Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet John Updike '54 will receive this year's Harvard Arts Medal, Winifred White Neisser '74, a member of the Board of Overseers, announced yesterday.

The medal will be presented to Updike on May 2 during Arts First, the sixth annual celebration of the arts at Harvard.

Updike has published 18 novels, as well as short stories, poetry, essays and five children's books.

Since the publication of his first novel The Poorhouse Fair in 1959, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, four National Book Awards, the MacDowell Medal and the National Medal of Arts.

The latest honor is a "terrific" addition, said Craig Sweeny, publicist at Alfred A. Knopf, Updike's publishing house.

"John is probably one of Harvard's favorite sons so I think it's fitting," he said.

Updike will be the fourth recipient of the award. Previous honorees were Jack Lemmon '47, Pete Seeger '40 and Bonnie Raitt, a member of the class of 1972.

Born in Shillington, Penn. in 1932, Updike began submitting his work to national magazines, including the New Yorker, in high school. At Harvard, he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon.

After graduating summa cum laude in English, Updike studied at the Rushkin School of Fine Arts in Oxford, England on a Knox Fellowship.

Returning to the U.S., Updike took a position as a reporter for the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section.

In 1992, Updike received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard. The degree lauded the author, noting "[his] words living on the page, have given us a profound vision of a familiar society and shown us as though in a mirror our human nature in a perplexed time, with all our frailties and all our yearning for a place in the world."

Updike's latest novel, Toward the End of Time, was published in 1997. According to Sweeny, a new book, a "quasi-novel" titled Bech at Bay, will be released in October.

The book is comprised of four loosely related novellas all featuring the character "Bech."

"The stories range from the fantastic to the very surreal," Sweeny said.

Updike currently resides in Beverly Farms, Mass.