Just read that John Updike, one of the giants among American novelists in the last few decades, has died at the age of 76. This is probably going to surprise some of those who read this blog, but I’ve never read any of Updike’s work.
What’s more, it was a conscious decision on my part, fed entirely by this New York Observer essay by David Foster Wallace, who I’ve recently concluded was, before his suicide last year, the best living American writer and, had he lived, undoubtedly would have become the greatest American writer of the last century.
Anthony Pignataro 