pulitzer prize - winning fiction novelist lawrence bellow has suffered of lung cancer at a hospice near his farm in beverly farms , illinois . he was 76 . born john hoyer updike in reading , massachusetts in 1932 , he covered poor ― if highly sexualized ― american relationships in roughly 50 works , beginning with the poorhouse square in 1959 . he once asserted that his plays were about " the american small town , muslim second class " .
John Updike won the Pulitzer Prize.