John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and from 1957 he lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of fifty-odd books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In 2006, Updike was given the Rea Award for the Short Story, and his Early Stories 1953-1975 received the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He died in January 2009.