Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels

These essays show the Rabbit novels to be a carefully crafted fabric of changing hues and textures, of social realism and something of grandeur, worthy of Dickens, Thackeray, and Joyce.

In the tales of"Rabbit" Angstrom-Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990) John Updike has produced one of the most compelling literary tapestries of our time. Updike's Rabbit, the aging high-school basketball star adrift in the century's confusion, is an archetypal American hero, one strikingly real and individual yet emblematic of his class, his country, and his era. Updike's remarkable achievements in these novels as poet and historian-his ingenious weaving of lyric and epic, of art and four decades of American politics-require that the novels be read on a variety of levels, thus lending themselves to the diverse critical approaches represented in Rabbit Tales.

Lawrence R. Broer brings together twelve essays by prominent Updike scholars to illuminate the unique achievement of the four Rabbit novels and demonstrate unequivocally the importance of the Rabbit novels to Updike's canon and to 20th-century American literature as a whole.