Reading Order
RabbitUpdike Rabbit Tetralogy Reading Order
John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960) is the opening novel of one of the great American tetralogy sequences — four novels tracking Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a former high school basketball star from Brewer, Pennsylvania, from his late twenties through his death in his late fifties, across four decades of American social history. The first novel follows Rabbit at 26, failing in his job and his marriage to the pregnant Janice, running south impulsively and returning to take up with a prostitute named Ruth — a portrait of American restlessness and the male inability to accept domestication. Updike continued the story in Rabbit Redux (1971), set during Apollo 11 and Vietnam; Rabbit Is Rich (1981), which won the Pulitzer, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award simultaneously; and Rabbit at Rest (1990), which won another Pulitzer and concluded with one of the great death scenes in American fiction. The four novels together constitute the most sustained portrait of a single American life in the literature.
Where to start
Rabbit, Run
Complete Rabbit Book List
- 1Buy
Rabbit, Run
John Updike·1960·Start here — Rabbit at 26, the failed basketball star, the impulsive flight, the indelible portrait of American male restlessness. - 2Buy
Rabbit Redux
John Updike·1971·Rabbit at 36 — Apollo 11, Vietnam, a runaway and a Black radical in his house, the 1960s arriving in Pennsylvania. - 3Buy
Rabbit Is Rich
John Updike·1981·Rabbit at 46 — running the Toyota dealership, the Carter years, triple-crowned winner (Pulitzer, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle). - 4Buy
Rabbit at Rest
John Updike·1990·Rabbit at 56 — Florida retirement, Reagan's America, the great American death, Updike's second Pulitzer. - 5Buy
Rabbit Remembered
John Updike·2000·The novella epilogue — ten years after Rabbit's death, Janice and his surviving son, the legacy examined.
Rabbit — Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to read all four Rabbit novels?
You don't have to, but the sequence rewards sustained reading more than almost any other American tetralogy. Each novel is self-contained — you can read Rabbit Is Rich without Rabbit Redux — but the cumulative effect of following a man from 26 to death across four decades of American history is what makes the sequence one of the great achievements of American fiction. Most readers who start with Rabbit, Run find themselves pulled through all four.
Why is Rabbit so difficult to like?
Rabbit Angstrom is one of American fiction's great anti-heroes precisely because Updike gives him enough intelligence and charm to be sympathetic while showing clearly how he fails the people around him — his wife, his children, the women who love him. The difficulty of liking Rabbit is the point: Updike is examining a kind of American male freedom that depends on the destruction of others, without either condemning or excusing it. The discomfort of admiring someone you can't endorse is the novel's central effect.
What makes the Rabbit novels historically important?
The four novels together constitute something no other American novelist achieved: a sustained portrait of one ordinary American man's life as a lens through which each decade — the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s — can be understood. Updike was obsessively interested in American middle-class life as the subject most literature ignored, and the Rabbit series is his fullest argument that nothing in American experience was beneath the novel's attention.
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