John H. Updike '54

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John H. Updike ’54, who showed early signs of his writing prowess while walking the halls of Harvard’s English department, died in late January of lung cancer at the age of 76. Updike authored more than 50 books over the course of his decades-long career and won two Pulitzers for his works “Rabbit is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest.”

Updike also served an eventful term as President of The Harvard Lampoon in 1953—kidnapping the president of The Harvard Crimson and orchestrating a close save of The Lampoon’s famed ibis statue. A noted perfectionist, he graduated summa cum laude the following year with a degree in English before going on to a fellowship at Oxford and a job at The New Yorker.

Michael J. Arlen ’52 met Updike when he arrived at The Lampoon as a freshman with stack of clippings from his high school newspaper tucked under his arm.

“He was one of those untroubled writers,” Arlen said of his younger colleague. Books, he recalled, came to Updike as effortlessly as dreams.

Many of Updike’s friends on The Lampoon came from wealthier backgrounds, but that did not stop the young writer—who grew up in Reading, Pa. and attended a small-town public school—from rising to the helm of the nationally-known humor magazine in 1953.

The writer’s humble background became a factor later, when the Signet Society—Harvard’s social club of arts and letters—almost did not accept Updike into their cloistered circle, since he could not pay the membership fee. Then-Crimson President Michael Maccoby ’54, who nominated Updike to the Signet, said that he convinced the Signet to waive Updike’s fees after telling them that if they did not allow him in, they would regret it for the rest of their lives.

Updike’s playful side will forever be memorialized in one 1953 incident that pit The Crimson and The Lampoon against one another. As Maccoby was walking back to Lowell House for lunch, Updike and three co-conspirators from kidnapped him, an act of retaliation for The Crimson’s earlier theft of the iconic golden ibis figure from atop The Lampoon’s building.

Updike, who was producing much of The Lampoon’s content while maintaining an exemplary academic record—he was one of only eight in his class to be inducted to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior—had little free time to devote to politics or parties, according to former Lampoon writer Eric B. Wentworth ’54, who lived in Lowell House with Updike.

Lewis L. B. Gifford ’51, who worked with Updike on The Lampoon, said Updike once showed him a bound volume of his early writings in his Hollis dorm room. The work had been typed by Updike’s mother, herself an aspiring writer who worked in a department store.

“It was like a premonition that he wasn’t fooling around—nor was his mother,” Gifford said.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.