Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels

In the tales of
Rabbit
Angstrom -
Rabbit, Run
(1960),
Rabbit Redux
(1971),
Rabbit is Rich
(1981) and
Rabbit at Rest
(1990 - Updike’s Rabbit, the ageing high-school basketball star adrift in the century’s confusion, is an archetypal American hero, one strikingly real and individual yet emblematic of his class, his country and his era. Updike’s achievements in these novels as poet and historian - his weaving of lyric and epic, of art and four decades of American politics - require that the novels be read on a variety of levels, thus lending themselves to the critical approaches represented in
Rabbit Tales . Lawrence R. Broer brings together 12 essays by prominent Updike scholars to illuminate the achievement of the four Rabbit novels and demonstrate the importance of the Rabbit novels to Updike’s canon and to 20th-century American literature as a whole.