Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (nee Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike. "One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is of seeing her at her desk... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in--and come back in."  These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories. Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and received a full scholarship to Harvard College, where he was the roommate of Christopher Lasch during their freshman year. Updike had already received recognition for his writing as a teenager by winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, and at Harvard he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to The Harvard Lampoon, of which he served as president. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa Society.  Upon graduation, Updike attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This was the beginning of his professional writing career.

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