An Appraisal - John Updike, Intuitive and Precise, Mapped America’s Mysteries - NYTimes.com

An Appraisal - John Updike, Intuitive and Precise, Mapped America’s Mysteries - NYTimes.com: "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."