An Analytical Critical Approach to A & P-Complete Summary & Analysis

By Students' Academy

About John Updike

Updike’s Themes

Text-A&P by John Updike

Introduction to A & P

Summary in Brief

Characters

About Major Characters

Themes

Motifs

Symbols

Critical Analysis

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raja Sharma
• Release date: Jul 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465867391

Students' Academy

Easy study guides for the students of English literature.

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An Analytical Critical Approach to A & P-Complete Summary & Analysis

Students’ Academy

Copyright

Copyright@2011 Students’ Academy

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Table of Contents

An Analytical Critical Approach to A & P-Complete Summary & Analysis

Copyright

Table of Contents

About the Author

Updike’s Themes

A & P

Introduction to A & P

Summary in Brief

Characters

About Major Characters

Major Themes

Motifs

Symbols

Critical Analysis

About the Author

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic who was born on March 18, 1932.

Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicled the life of Harry Rabbit Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit At Rest (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism, and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.

Updike was well-known for his meticulous craftsmanship, distinct prose style, and prolificacy. He wrote, on average, a book a year. Updike populated his fiction with characters who frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity. His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans; its emphasis on Christian theology; and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted a significant amount of critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of a wry, intelligent authorial voice that extravagantly describes the physical world while remaining squarely in the realist tradition. Updike famously described his own style as an attempt to give the mundane its beautiful due.

Updike was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike and Linda Grace Hoyer in Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to be a published writer influenced the young Updike's own aspirations. He later recalled how his mother's writing inspired him as a child. One of my earliest memories is of seeing her at her desk... I admired the writer's equipment: the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in.

These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories. He graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950. Updike later attended Harvard after receiving a full scholarship. At Harvard, he "immediately established himself as a major talent of indefatigable energy, submitting a steady stream of articles and