Author John Updike is best known for "Rabbit is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest.  Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike grew up in nearby Shillington, where his father taught science at a public high school.  The area provide Updike material for many of his writings.  His mother encourage John, her only child, to become a writer.  Updike excelled in high school where he served as President and graduated as a covaledictorian.  After gradiating fom high school Updike worked for the Reading Eagle newspaper in Shillington.  Updike attended Harvard University where his major was English.  In 1954, he graduated among the top in his class at Harvard.  He then went to Oxford University in England with his wife.

Updike returned to Manhattan where he became a writer for The New Yorker magazine.  In 1958, Harper and Brotheres published his first book of poetry, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures.  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.  With widespread acclaim, Updike was encouraged to continue writing.  His next book, Rabbit Run, was a runwaway success.  The novel introduced one of Updike's most memorable characters, the small-town athlete, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom.   The book was filled with sexual forays and obscenity.  Despite controversy, the book solidifid Updike's reputation as one of the twentieth centuries most formidible writers.

- After the birth of a third child, Updike rented a one-room office above a restaurant in Ipswich, where he wrote for several hours every morning, six days a week, a schedule he adhered to throughout his career. In 1963, he received the National Book Award for his novel

, inspired by his childhood in Pennsylvania. The following year, at age 32, he became the youngest person ever elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and was invited by the State Department to tour eastern Europe as part of a cultural exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1967, he joined the author Robert Penn Warren and other American writers in signing a letter urging Soviet writers to defend Jewish cultural institutions under attack by the Soviet government.

In 1968, Updike's novel Couples created a national sensation with its portrayal of the complicated relationships among a set of young married couples in the suburbs. It remained on the best-seller lists for over a year and prompted a Time magazine cover story featuring Updike. In Bech: A Book (1970), Updike introduced a new protagonist, the imaginary novelist Henry Bech, who, like Rabbit Angstrom, was destined to reappear in Updike's fiction for many years. Rabbit Angstrom reappeared in Rabbit Redux (1971).

In the 1970s, Updike continued to travel as a cultural ambassador of the United States, and in 1974 he joined authors John Cheever, Arthur Miller and Richard Wilbur in calling on the Soviet government to cease its persecution of dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Updike separated from his wife Mary in 1974 and moved to Boston where he taught briefly at Boston University. Two years later, the Updikes were divorced, and in 1977 he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and her three children in Georgetown, Massachusetts.

Rabbit is Rich, published in 1981, received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1983 Updike's other alter ego, Harry Bech, reappeared in Bech is Back, and Updike was featured in a second Time magazine cover story, "Going Great at 50." Among his novels of the 1980s and 1990s are a trilogy retelling The Scarlet Letter from the points of view of three different characters, and a prequel to Hamlet, entitled Gertrude and Claudius. In 1991 he received a second Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit at Rest. He was only the third American to win a second Pulitzer Prize in the fiction category.

In an autobiographical essay, Updike famously identified sex, art, and religion as "the three great secret things" in human experience. The grandson of a Presbyterian minister (his first father-in-law was also a minister), his writing in all genres has displayed a preoccupation with philosophical questions. A lifelong churchgoer and student of Christian theology, the Jesuit magazine America awarded him its Campion Award in 1997 as a "distinguished Christian person of letters." He received the National Medal of Art from President George H.W. Bush in 1989, and in 2003 was presented with the National Medal for the Humanities from President George W. Bush. He was one of a very few Americans to receive both of these honors. The same year saw the publication of a comprehensive collection, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.

John Updike spent his last years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, in the same corner of New England where so much of his fiction is set. His last book was The Widows of Eastwick (2008), a sequel to his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick. Updike succumbed to lung cancer the following year at the age of 76.

This John Updike autograph reproduction would look great in an album or display.