John Updike, one of the giants of 20th-century American literature, died Tuesday, January 27, after a battle with lung cancer. He was 76.

While Updike seemed to embody the essence of a tweedy author rubbing elbow patches with the intelligentsia, he hailed from a working-class town in Pennsylvania and made his mark by crystallizing—and sharing—the anxieties of post-war middle America. In a career that started at the New Yorker in 1955 and included novels, short stories, poems, and criticism, his writing was gorgeously lyrical, occasionally racy, and often downright funny. Works like The Witches of Eastwick or his four novels chronicling the life of Rabbit Angstrom chipped at the veneer of American idealism and forced readers to reevaluate themselves and the life to which they thought they aspired.

Updike continued to tackle contemporary issues right up to one of his final novels, The Terrorist, or even in this speech he gave at the 2006 Book Expo of America, in which he skewers the idea of digitizing books for the "universal library." Indeed, even when he was speaking softly, Updike's was a voice that echoed throughout American letters.

The Works of John Updike
Tribute: Author Nicholson Baker on John Updike