“The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.”

American novelist, poet, and critic

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. He is known for a career that ranged across fiction, poetry, criticism, and children’s books, and for being one of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. Over the course of his career, Updike published more than 20 novels and more than a dozen short-story collections, along with poetry and books of art and literary criticism. His work reflects that wide range, moving between fiction and commentary with equal ease.