Introduction John Updike wrote very interesting novels of the Rabbit series, two of which were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. According to Updike, his lead characters typifies small town and middle-class Americans, with craftsmanship considered one of the best with at least twenty novels, aside from short stories, poems, literary and art criticisms published mainly in The New Yorker. This paper will write an extended essay on four Rabbit stories using outside sources to support my insight and overall assessment of John Updike. Discussion Rabbit Run is a novel about 26-year old Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom who sells kitchen gadgets. He is married to his high school girlfriend Janice. They have a 2-year old son Nelson. A former high school basketball player, he is quite restless and found his life incomplete. He soon set out to visit his basketball coach Marty Tothero who introduced him to Ruth Leonard, a prostitute. They started an affair at a time when Janice was pregnant. Janice returned to her parent’s house and they only started to reconcile after she gave birth to Rebecca June. At his time, Rabbit takes a post at Janice’s father’s Toyota car dealership. One time, Rabbit was encouraged by a minister’s wife for a visit of which when he refused, the minister’s wife slammed the door on him. He went home to have physical contact with Janice who was in postnatal condition. After Janice refused, he returned to Ruth. This resulted in Janice turning to alcohol, and in one of her drinking binge, she accidentally drowned her baby Rebecca. The novel ended with Rabbit having mixed conclusions as Ruth becomes pregnant but Rabbit refuses to divorce Janice. Boroff (1960) suggested that Rabbit is a less articulate and older version of JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, trapped by wife, baby, and a glamorized salesman job. He felt like a living dead, in a coffin still to be drained of his blood, and yet, he seeks spiritual answers and is interested in the “psychic underside of sexuality” as Boroff (1960, BR4) explicitly suggested. Rabbit Redux is the sequel to Rabbit, Run where Harry “Rabbit” Armstrong, approaching middle age, finds his job unsatisfactory. This has been complicated when his wife Janice leaves him and their son for another man. “Has she seemed any different to you lately, Harry? Listen, I know in all probability it’s what they call a crock of shit, but – has she seemed any, you know, different lately?” his father had asked him in a bar. He had felt cold at that time, aware of pain. Their separation was further aggravated when Harry hosted contrasting personalities: African-American Skeeter, a Vietnamese drug dealer, and a runaway pampered girl-woman Jill. Here, as Harry debates with Skeeter or the Vietnamese about race, he explores sexual relations with the girl. In the end, Rabbit reconciles with Janice. Skeeter takes a biting, strong character here, “a compound of drug-induced delusions of grandeur, real indignation, homicidal rage, and quirky genius,” that shook now and then Rabbit’s prejudices and personality (Broyard, 1971). For Broyard (1971), the initial reading of Rabbit Redux is a delimitation of a formerly athletic running “creep”, neither an artist nor an intellectual. However, he changed observation and finally admitt