The books have also created a Kodachrome-sharp picture of American life.

'Taken together, this quartet of novels has given its readers a wonderfully vivid portrait of one Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom. Now, thanks to Everyman's Library, this volume exists, titled, as I had long hoped, with the name of the protagonist, an everyman who, like all men, was unique and mortal.'

A some point between the second and third of the series, I began to visualize four completed novels that might together make a single coherent volume, a mega-novel. became a kind of running report on the state of my hero and his nation. 'The character of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom was for me a way in-a ticket to the America all around me. This Rabbit Angstrom volume is composed of the following novels: Rabbit, Run Rabbit Redux Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.įROM THE INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR written especially for this edition: He has given us our representative American story. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels-the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life. When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Description The four novels in the acclaimed Rabbit series-including the Pulitzer Prize winners Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest-brought together in a single volume, from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century.

Rabbit redux by john updike