This series delves into the complexities of human existence, following a central character's journey through life's myriad challenges. It explores themes of identity, isolation, and the search for meaning in the modern world. The narrative is characterized by its raw realism and profound psychological insight into its characters.
Twenty-two-year-old Rabbit Angstrom is a salesman in a local department store, father of a preschool-age son, and husband to an alcoholic wife who was his second-best high school sweetheart. The squalor and tragedy of their lives reminds us that salvation is a personal undertaking.
It's 1969 and Rabbit has changed, as America has changed in the intervening ten years since the book "Rabbit, Run". His marriage is collapsing, his job is redundant and the urgency of racial tension present a challenge neither his consciousness nor his sexuality can resist.
It is 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He has dropped to a slow walk in order to enjoy the fruits of middle-aged affluence. True, he avoids mirrors, where he used to love them, and a succession of chins ripple gently where there used to be one, but he has made it.
Winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In John Updike's fourth and final novel about ex-basketball player Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the hero has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo, and a second grandchild. His son and daughter-in-law are acting erratically, his wife Janice wants to work, and Rabbit is searching his soul, looking for reasons to live.
Collected with a dozen wonderful stories, all set in classic Updike territory, the short novel 'RABBIT REMEMBERED' is a major work in its own right - a riveting return to Updike's most celebrated fictional world. Janice and Nelson Angstrom, plus several other survivors of the irreducible Rabbit, fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness over the edge of the millennium, as a number of old strands come together in entirely unexpected ways.
When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels—the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life.Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century; and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. He has given us our representative American story.This Rabbit Angstrom volume is composed of the following novels: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.
Newly revised by the author for this edition, and printed together in one volume for the first time, Updike's four Rabbit novels chronicle the history of a man and a nation from the 1950s to the 1980s. Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, athlete, is Mr Middle America. Dazzling in style, tender in feeling, often erotic in description and coruscating with realistic details which recreate a world in each novel, these books give a complete picture of their age.
The trilogy comprises of Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich. It is intended as an amusing, sympathetic study of a man, Rabbit Angstron, putting up a fight against the inevitable.
The first and second novels in John Updike's acclaimed quartet of Rabbit books -- now in one marvelous volume. RABBIT, RUN"Brilliant and poignant . . . By his compassion, clarity of insight, and crystal-bright prose, [Updike] makes Rabbit's sorrow his and out own.The Washington Post"Precise, graceful, stunning, he is an athlete of words and images. He is also an impeccable observer of thoughts and feelings."The Village VoiceRABBIT REDUX"Great in love, in art, boldness, freedom, wisdom, kindness, exceedingly rich in intelligence, wit, imagination, and feeling -- a great and beautiful thing . . . these hyperboles (quoted from a letter written long ago by Thomas Mann) come to mind after reading John Updike's Rabbit Redux.The New York Times Book Review "Updike owns a rare verbal genius, a gifted intelligence and a sense of tragedy made bearable by wit. . . . A masterpiece.Time
