New Essays on Rabbit Run

The American Novel series provides students of American literature with introductory critical guides to the great works of American literature. Each volume begins with a substantial introduction by a distinguished authority on the text, giving details of the work's composition, publication history, and contemporary reception, as well as a survey of the major critical trends and readings from first publication to the present. This overview is followed by a group of new essays, each specially commissioned from a leading scholar in the field, which together constitute a forum of interpretive methods and prominent contemporary ideas on the text. There are also helpful guides to further reading. Specifically designed for undergraduates, the series will be a powerful resource for anyone engaged in the critical analysis of major American novels and other important texts. Still John Updike's most popular and critically acclaimed novel, Rabbit, Run was written in 1959 when the author was only twenty-eight years old; it announced the thematic concerns and stylistic innovations through which the author was to explore the American psyche and gauge the temper and history of its culture over the next three decades. The first of a tetralogy, Rabbit, Run introduced the character of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, one of those middle-class Americans who, in Updike's view, aren't especially beautiful or bright or urban but about whom there is a lot worth saying. The fallible hero struggles with his own sexuality, his religious feelings, the difficulties of being a son and a father, and with the changes in American society that confuse and excite, and finally seem to suffocate him. Updike's writing is chargedwith narrative energy and pictorial accuracy that illuminate the present moment as they evoke the tension between the drab compromises we are forced to make with age and the religious mystery that sustains us against them. Written by a distinguished group of international scholars,