Some have suggested that Updike mined this news source too extensively.

“I would have thought he would have gone into some other major themes because of his phenomenal talent,” Johnson says.

Still, laurels of success have followed Updike everywhere.

His 1968 novel Couples, based on the social milieu he had encountered in Ipswich, won Updike a spot on the cover of Time—the first of two cover features about him that the magazine ran in fewer than 15 years.

Last year, he received the National Medal for the Humanities and the National Medal of Art. His latest major publication, a collection of his early stories, took the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction last month.

Still, Johnson says success has not jaded the writer.

“John has become very famous, but he is a man who wears his fame, for his friends, very lightly,” he says. “When you see him, it’s just like old days.”

He even worked with Johnson, a history professor whose research touches on Africa, to research his 1978 novel The Coup, set in an imagined African nation.

He has occasionally taken political stands as well, co-authoring an open letter against the harassment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 and, in 1978, testifying before members of Congress against government support for the arts.

In addition to fiction and poetry, Updike—who now tries to produce three pages every day—has written a play and the libretto for an opera with music by Gunther Schuller.

Remaining close to Cambridge in the 50 years since his graduation, Updike has been a frequent visitor to Harvard. He received the University’s Arts First medal in 1998.

His work has frequently been turned into films—often for television, but occasionally for the big screen as well. His novel The Witches of Eastwick, became a film starring Cher, Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon.

During the earlier part of Updike’s career, he has said, fans frequently greeted him with the exclamation, “Run, Rabbit, run!” in reference to his precocious success.

The joke has tarnished under the weight of what Updike has described as his “ponderously growing oeuvre, dragging behind [him] like an ever-heavier tail.” But even half a century later, the image remains an apt one for the small-town high-achiever who grappled through Harvard and, for the 50 years since, has sustained a steady pace across the page.

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.