John Updike - Plowville, PA - Grave of a Famous Person on Waymarking.com

From Find a Grave: A Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, he was a prolific man of letters and an erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in postwar America. Considered one of the most prominent contemporary American novelists of his time, his works included over 50 books in a career that began in the 1950s. Won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzer Prizes, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards. Also wrote stories, reviews, and poems that appeared in The New Yorker magazine and wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.

John Updike's tombstone was made by his son Michael and on the backside, Michael carved a poem that John wrote very early in his career called Telephone Poles.
The old men say
young men in gray
hung this thread across our plains
acres and acres ago.

But we the enlightened, know
in point of fact it’s what remains
of the flight of a marvellous crow
no one saw;
each pole a caw.

The front of the tombstone contains the many names that John had used during his lifetime - Dad, John, Johnny, etc.

The grave only contains some of the ashes of John Updike buried in a hole next to the tombstone. The remainder of his ashes are in a creamation garden in Manchester, MA.

Description: John Updike was born in Shillington, PA and later moved with his family to Plowville, PA. After graduation from high school, he attended Harvard where his writing skills soon became evident. After attending school in England for a few more years, he returned to the states and worked for The New Yorker for two years and then settled in Ipswich, MA where he wrote the first of his four volume Rabbit, Run novels. Around 1980, he wrote the third Rabbit book which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His final Rabbit book was written in 1990 and, again, it won a Pulitzer Prize which made him only one of three writers to ever receive two Pulitzer Prizes for writing fiction. John continued to write in various forms of literature...poetry, fiction, autobiography...until he passed away in 2009 from lung cancer. Date of birth: 03/18/1932 Date of death: 01/27/2009 Area of notoriety: Literature Marker Type: Headstone Setting: Outdoor Visiting Hours/Restrictions: Closed dusk to dawn Fee required?: No Web site: [Web Link]

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Date Logged Log   02/29/2024 ted28285 visited it