“That’s why we love disaster. Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God.” This is a description of John Updike’s award-winning “Rabbit Tetralogy” which follows the life of a former high-school basketball star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who is trapped in a loveless marriage, hates his boring sales job, and dreams of attempts to escape the constraints of his life.

Besides his 200 or so short stories, literary criticisms, books of poems, and books on art, Updike published 21 novels of which this “Rabbit” series is the most read and notable. There was a new addition to this collection almost every ten years from 1960 to 1990.

Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1982 and 1991 for books three and four, one of only three authors to win the prize twice. Similar to his short stories, middle-class life, marital problems often affecting children, and crises in faith or religious beliefs are themes running through these novels.

We will read the first three books of the series, which will take us from the 1950s through the 1970s. There will be about 166 pages of reading each week.

Updike’s writing is some of the finest in American literature. I hope you will join me in tracking our antihero through thirty important years of his life, and our country’s as well."