John Updike died yesterday at the age of 76.
Here’s Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times:
Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.
I'm Newley Purnell, an American journalist whose work has run in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and more.
I was based in Bangkok for six years and am now a