Everyman's Library #0214: Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy

When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels — the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life.

Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century; and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. He has given us our representative American story.

This collection of beautiful, enduring hardcover editions features modern American masterpieces, including works by Nobel Prize and National Book Award winners. With elegant cloth sewn bindings, gold stamped covers, and silk ribbon markers, these classics are an essential for any home library.

Titles included:

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

Revolutionary Road; The Easter Parade; Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

From Chinua Achebe to Toni Morrison and Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion, the Everymans Library Contemporary Classics set is a collection of the finest literature of our time by award-winning and bestselling writers with new introductions and author chronologies.

This set includes one each of the following titles:

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Best of Wodehouse by P. G. Wodehouse

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

Carried Away by Alice Munro

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Collected Stories by Franz Kafka

Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler

Collected Stories by Roald Dahl

Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

The Collected Works by Kahlil Gibran

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories by Dashiell Hammett

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Dubliners by James Joyce

Essays by George Orwell

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Mr. Sampath--The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Drivers Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan

The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Three Novels of Ancient Egypt: Khufus Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War by Naguib Mahfouz

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Ulysses by James Joyce

Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing by Evelyn Waugh

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

The Woman Warrior, China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

Zenos Conscience by Italo Svevo

Everymans Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He was graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in England on the Knox Fellowship, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, to which he has contributed numerous short stories, poems, and book reviews. He is the author of sixteen other books of fiction and the father of two sons and two daughters. Since 1957 he has resided in Massachusetts.

Rabbit, run — Rabbit redux — Rabbit is rich — Rabbit at rest.