Reading List

Authors Like John Updike

Q: What should I read after the Rabbit novels?

Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (1986) and its sequels, and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008), which follows one difficult character into old age. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) is the novel that came before Rabbit.

Q: Is there a new John Updike book?

Updike died in 2009, but Selected Letters of John Updike, about 700 letters edited by James Schiff, was published by Knopf on 21 October 2025.

Q: Which John Updike book should I read first?

Rabbit, Run (1960) is the usual starting point; it begins the four-novel series whose last two volumes won the Pulitzer Prize. The Witches of Eastwick (1984) is lighter, and Self-Consciousness (1989) is his memoir.

John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on 18 March 1932 and grew up in nearby Shillington. His first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1954, the start of more than half a century of stories, poems and reviews for the magazine. In Rabbit, Run (1960), Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a twenty-six-year-old former high-school basketball star who demonstrates kitchen gadgets in dime stores, walks out on his pregnant wife. Updike returned to him roughly once a decade, and the last two novels, Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), both won the Pulitzer Prize. He died in January 2009. In October 2025 Knopf published Selected Letters of John Updike, about 700 letters edited by James Schiff. The ten writers below share his territory: marriage, the suburbs, desire, and the American middle class seen up close.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · American realism · Marriage and the suburbs · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love John Updike, start with John Cheever, who wrote suburban marriage for The New Yorker alongside him. Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels follow one ordinary man over decades, as the Rabbit books do, and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961) shows a 1950s suburban marriage coming apart. Further down are the 1920s novelist who mapped the same middle class first, a novelist who wrote a whole book about his obsession with Updike, and the novel that tells this story from the wife’s side.

10 authors like John Updike

The middle class, first mapped

Sinclair Lewis

American · Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922)

Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in 1885 and died in Rome in 1951. Babbitt follows George F. Babbitt, a real-estate broker in the Midwestern city of Zenith, through a year of boosterism, conformity and half-hearted rebellion. In 1930 Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Babbitt is Rabbit’s grandfather: a small-city businessman who senses his life is hollow and cannot quite escape it. Lewis satirises from above; Updike stays inside his hero’s head and gives him more sympathy.

— Lisanne

Suburbia in The New Yorker

John Cheever

American · The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912 and died in 1982. His stories, many first published in The New Yorker, follow commuters, cocktail parties and failing marriages in the suburbs of New York; in “The Swimmer” (1964) a man decides to swim home through his neighbours’ pools. The Stories of John Cheever won the Pulitzer Prize.

Cheever and Updike were the two great New Yorker writers of suburban marriage. Cheever is darker and more dreamlike; Updike more physical and more precise about things.

— Lisanne

The 1950s marriage, unmasked

Richard Yates

American · Revolutionary Road (1961), Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962)

Yates was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1926 and died in 1992. Revolutionary Road follows Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple in 1955 Connecticut who believe they are too good for the suburbs and plan an escape to Paris. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and was filmed in 2008.

Published the year after Rabbit, Run, it covers the same ground: a young man in a marriage he feels trapped in, in a decade that promised contentment. Yates gives the wife’s despair as much weight as the husband’s.

— Lisanne

Every book by Richard Yates →

One ordinary man, over decades

Richard Ford

American · The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995)

Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. The Sportswriter introduced Frank Bascombe, a divorced sportswriter in suburban New Jersey; Ford followed him across five books, ending with Be Mine (2023). Independence Day was the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

The closest heir to the Rabbit books: one man followed across decades of American life, his marriage, children and suburb. Bascombe is more reflective than Rabbit and talks to the reader; Updike stays closer to the body.

— Lisanne

Every book by Richard Ford →

Family life in Baltimore

Anne Tyler

American · Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), Breathing Lessons (1988)

Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941 and has set most of her novels in Baltimore. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant follows the three grown children of a mother who raised them alone after their father left; Breathing Lessons, about one day in a long marriage, won the Pulitzer Prize. Updike reviewed Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in The New Yorker in 1982.

Tyler shares Updike’s attention to the domestic and his affection for ordinary, flawed people; her marriages are less erotic and more comic. Good for readers who value the Rabbit books for their family life more than their affairs.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anne Tyler →

The next generation’s New Yorker

Ann Beattie

American · Distortions (1976), Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976)

Beattie was born in Washington, D.C., in 1947 and first became known in the 1970s for stories in The New Yorker. Chilly Scenes of Winter, her first novel, follows Charles, a young government employee who cannot get over a woman who has gone back to her husband. She won the PEN/Malamud Award in 2000 and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2005.

Beattie wrote the children of Updike’s suburbs: the generation that came of age in the 1960s and drifted through the 1970s. Like Updike, she builds her stories out of exact domestic detail.

— Lisanne

A small town over decades

Elizabeth Strout

American · Olive Kitteridge (2008), Olive, Again (2019)

Strout was born in Portland, Maine, in 1956. Olive Kitteridge, a novel in thirteen linked stories about a retired schoolteacher in a small Maine town, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. Olive returns in Olive, Again, and characters from her books recur in later novels such as Tell Me Everything (2024).

Strout does for Olive what Updike did for Rabbit: a difficult, unglamorous person followed into old age in a precisely observed small place. Her focus is marriage and loneliness from a woman’s side.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elizabeth Strout →

The wife’s side

Marilyn French

American · The Women’s Room (1977)

French was born in New York in 1929 and died in 2009. The Women’s Room follows Mira, a 1950s suburban wife and mother, through divorce and into graduate school at Harvard in the late 1960s, alongside the women she meets there. It became an international bestseller.

The writer here who complicates Updike. His novels mostly see the suburban marriage through the husband; French tells the same decades from the wife’s side, and her account of what those marriages cost women is an argument with the whole genre.

— Lisanne

The everyday, at full length

Karl Ove Knausgård

Norwegian · My Struggle (2009–2011)

Knausgård was born in Oslo in 1968. My Struggle, six autobiographical novels published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011 and translated into English mainly by Don Bartlett, describes his childhood, his father’s death, his marriages and his children in exhaustive everyday detail. Some relatives objected publicly to how they were portrayed.

Updike made ordinary middle-class life the subject of a lifetime’s work; Knausgård takes that attention to its limit. Both write marriage, fatherhood and desire at very close range.

— Lisanne

Every book by Karl Ove Knausgård →

A whole book about Updike

Nicholson Baker

American · The Mezzanine (1988), U and I (1991)

Baker was born in New York in 1957. The Mezzanine takes place during one office worker’s lunch-hour escalator ride and is built from digressions and footnotes on shoelaces, straws and staplers. U and I is an account of his obsession with Updike, whom he had met only briefly, written deliberately without rereading Updike’s books.

Baker took Updike’s attention to small physical things and made it the whole method, and he examines that debt at length in U and I. Read him for the texture of Updike’s prose with the plot taken out.

— Lisanne

Every book by Nicholson Baker →

Where to start if you loved John Updike

If you loved the Rabbit books, read Richard Ford.

The Sportswriter: the first of five books following Frank Bascombe through American life.

If you loved Couples, read John Cheever.

The Stories of John Cheever: commuters, cocktails and marriages in the suburbs.

If you want the 1950s marriage at its bleakest, read Richard Yates.

Revolutionary Road: a young couple who think they are too good for Connecticut.

If you want the wife’s side, read Marilyn French.

The Women’s Room: a suburban wife’s marriage, divorce and second life.

If you want more Updike, start with Rabbit.

Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), then the memoir Self-Consciousness (1989) and Selected Letters of John Updike (2025).

Frequently asked questions about authors like John Updike

Who writes like John Updike?

John Cheever, Richard Ford and Richard Yates are the closest matches. Cheever wrote suburban marriage for The New Yorker alongside him, Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels follow one man over decades as the Rabbit books do, and Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961) shows a 1950s marriage coming apart.

What should I read after the Rabbit novels?

Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (1986) and its sequels, and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008), which follows one difficult character into old age. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922) is the novel that came before Rabbit.

Is John Updike like John Cheever?

Yes, in subject: both wrote about suburban marriage, adultery and the middle class, much of it first published in The New Yorker. Cheever’s stories are darker and more dreamlike; Updike’s are more physical and detailed.

Is there a new John Updike book?

Updike died in 2009, but Selected Letters of John Updike, about 700 letters edited by James Schiff, was published by Knopf on 21 October 2025.

Which John Updike book should I read first?

Rabbit, Run (1960) is the usual starting point; it begins the four-novel series whose last two volumes won the Pulitzer Prize. The Witches of Eastwick (1984) is lighter, and Self-Consciousness (1989) is his memoir.

Was John Updike criticised for how he wrote about women?

Yes. Some critics, including James Wood, have described a misogynistic outlook in his fiction, and his frank sexual writing has divided readers. Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977) tells the same suburban decades from the wife’s side.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like John Updike

10 authors like John Updike

Sinclair Lewis

John Cheever

Richard Yates

Richard Ford

Anne Tyler

Ann Beattie

Elizabeth Strout

Marilyn French

Karl Ove Knausgård

Nicholson Baker

Where to start if you loved John Updike

Frequently asked questions about authors like John Updike

Who writes like John Updike?

What should I read after the Rabbit novels?

Is John Updike like John Cheever?

Is there a new John Updike book?

Which John Updike book should I read first?

Was John Updike criticised for how he wrote about women?

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