John Updike

Without warning, David was visited by an exact vision of death: a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede.
Pigeon Feathers, in John Updike's The Early Stories 1953-1975 (Knopf, 2003)

I will have more to say about Updike, an author about whom I have been hot and cold, presently but right now I wanted to mention Carl Rollyson's review in the June 2014 The New Criterion of Adam Begley's biography.  It is a short review but quite perceptive about not only Updike but biography in general and the relation of an author's life to his work.  Rollyson focuses on the short story Pigeon Feathers, published --as were many of Updike's stories -- in The New Yorker and emphasizing an adolescent's crisis of faith.  It captures the feeling of an adolescent who reads H.G. Wells and P.G. Wodehouse and can't get satisfactory answers about death from his clergyman.  Rollyson feels, correctly, that the religious elements of Updike's work have been neglected for the sexual elements and he suggests that Updike is possibly not the smug writer that some of us have thought lately, but rather more philosophical.  Of course someone who produced as much work as Updike did is bound to have a range of quality in his work but Rollyson says "Rather than a reason for us to deplore a prolific artist, a sizeable body of work affords an opportunity to admire a dedicated craftsman unafraid of failure" and Rollyson suggests a number of new ways to look at Updike's work, with the assistance of Begley's biography.