John Updike (d. 2009), winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, both the 1989 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Humanities Medal, twice on the cover of “Time Magazine,” winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement, and 2008 Jefferson Lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the highest humanities honor bestowed by the government of the United States
“Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In