Rabbit Is Real - How John Updike Turned Everything in His Life to His Advantage in Fiction

New York Magazine - By Adam Begley

In the late spring of 1983, when John Updike’s reputation as a writer had reached a pinnacle with Rabbit Is Rich (which won all three major book awards and earned him a second Time cover), a journalist named William Ecenbarger pitched an idea to the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday magazine. The reporter wanted to write about the relationship between Updike’s fiction and the geography of Berks County, Pennsylvania—what Updike called, with possessive emphasis, “my home turf.” 

Ecenbarger planned to visit the city of Reading, where Updike was born; Shillington, the small town on the outskirts of Reading where he lived until he was 13; and Plowville, 11 miles into the countryside, where he languished in frustrated rural isolation until he left for college. From these three places Updike had drawn the material that launched his career: Plowville became Firetown, and Reading became Alton (or Brewer in the Rabbit tetralogy), and beloved, small-town Shillington was reborn as Olinger, with a long O and a hard g, as in “Oh, linger.”

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