Johnson says he remembers when Updike left Lowell House to get married, but never noticed any change in the Lampoon president—or his work—in he months that followed.

“At first people thought it’s going to be difficult from the point of view of the magazine, but it wasn’t,” he says.

And by that point in Updike’s undergraduate career, his interests had veered increasingly toward writing.

Despite being repeatedly rejected from Archibald McLeish’s poetry workshop, he was able to take a fiction-writing class with Albert Guerard, where he drafted a short story about a former basketball player named Flick.

Though Guerard’s comments on the manuscript suggest several small changes—the opening paragraph was too conventional, he explained, and the main character needed to be more clearly defined—he said he found “real power and authenticity” in the piece and suggested that Updike submit it to The New Yorker.

It was rejected, as were a few other attempts. But the summer after Updike’s graduation, preparing to study drawing at Oxford on a Knox fellowship in the fall, he wrote a short story in response to a piece by John Cheever that he had read. The New Yorker accepted it and, a bit later, bought a slightly revised version of his ex-basketball-player story, now titled “Ace in the Hole.”

The character of a high-school basketball star carried Updike through the first leg of a precocious literary career. Flick Webb became the ex-basketball player in an early poem that remains one of his most anthologized, and, more famously, Rabbit Angstrom the hero of a tetrology of novels that has become the cornerstone of his oeuvre.

Flick Webb is the subject of an early poem that remains one of his most anthologized, and, more famously, the figure of the ex-basketball player evolved into Rabbit Angstrom, the hero of a tetrology of novels that remains the cornerstone of Updike’s oeuvre.

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Updike wrote the four alliteratively titled “Rabbit” novels about a decade apart, beginning in 1959, tracking middle-class America over a period of 40 years through the realism that has become his hallmark. The last two of the series collectively garnered two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, a National Book Critic’s Circle Award and the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The New England setting that has been his home for nearly 50 years has strongly colored Updike’s work, particularly during the second half of his career.

He decided to stay in the area, he has written, after falling in love with it in college.

Updike has left New England only twice since finishing his education—once to take a job in Manhattan as a Talk of the Town reporter for The New Yorker in the late 1950s, and once to England, in an effort to escape the turbulence of the late 1960s.

Otherwise, he has moved among a series of homes in the Boston area: after leaving New York he and his growing family moved to Ipswich, Mass. where he’d had his honeymoon. Divorcing in 1976 and remarrying a year later, he first moved inland to Georgetown, and then, in the mid-1980s, to the coastal community of Beverly Farms, where he presently lives in the childhood home of a Harvard classmate.

In his memoirs, Updike explains that the decision to live in small New England towns gave him “a place out of harm’s—e.g. New York agents’ and literary groupies’—way, yet one from which [he] believed reports would be news.”