In addition to novelist and poet, Updike was also an influential critic. He would regularly turn up writing about Nabokov in the back pages of The New Yorker, art in The New York Review of Books, or about his favorite sport in Golf or Golf Digest.

Updike is seen here with Atlantic Monthly editor Robert Manning, center, and biographer Justin Kaplan at Boston's Athenaeum on Jan. 25, 1979.