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And a portrayer of the middle class

Subjects

White Noise explores several themes that emerged during the mid-to-late twentieth century, e.g., rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the potentially positive virtues of human violence. The title "white noise" is a metaphor pointing to the confluence of all of those aforementioned symptoms of postmodernism culture that in their coming-together make it very difficult for an individual to actualize his or her ideas and personality.

DeLillo wanted to call the book Panasonic ("The word 'panasonic', split into its component parts—'pan,' from the Greek, meaning 'all,' and 'sonic,' from the Latin sonus, meaning 'sound'—strikes me as the one title that suggests the sound-saturation that is so vital to the book...."), but was denied permission from the Matsushita corporation.

Barry Sonnenfeld was preparing a film version of White Noise for 2006. However, pre-production appears to have ceased as of the fall of 2006 and the Internet Movie Database has removed all references to this movie.

John Updike as a “sensitive barometer of the American temperament”

John Hoyer Updike (born March 18, 1932) is an American writer born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, where he lived until he was 13. Updike's most famous works are his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.

As a teenager, Updike was encouraged by his mother to write. Updike entered Harvard University on a full scholarship. He served as president of the Harvard Lampoon before graduating in 1954 with a degree in English before joining The New Yorker as a regular contributor. In 1957, Updike left Manhattan and moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, which served as the model for the fictional New England town of Tarbox in his 1968 novel, Couples. In 1959 he published a well-regarded collection of short stories, The Same Door, which included both "Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?" and "A Trillion Feet of Gas." Other classic stories include "A&P," "Pigeon Feathers," "The Alligators," and "Museums and Women." His 1960 New Yorker essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," about Boston baseball legend Ted Williams' last game, is regarded as being among the best examples of sportswriting.

He favors realism and naturalism in his writing; for instance, the opening of Rabbit, Run spans several pages describing a pick-up basketball game in intricate detail. His writing typically focuses on relationships among people: friends, married couples, or those in extramarital affairs. Couples and the Rabbit tetralogy, in particular, follow this pattern. In the Rabbit books, the changing social, political, and economic history of America forms the background to the Angstrom's marriage and acts occasionally as a commentary on it - and vice versa.

On occasion Updike abandons this setting, examples being The Witches of Eastwick (1984, later made into a movie of the same name); The Coup (novel) (1978, about a fictional Cold War-era African dictatorship), and in his 2000 postmodern novel Gertrude and Claudius (a prelude to the story of Hamlet illuminating three versions of the legend including William Shakespeare's). Other important novels include The Centaur (National Book Award, 1963), Couples (1968) and Roger's Version (1986). In addition to Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a recurrent Updike alter-ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist Henry Bech who is chronicled in three comic short story cycles, Bech: A Book (1970), Bech is Back (1981) and Bech At Bay: A Quasi-Novel (1998). His stories involving the socially-conscious (and social-climbing) couple "The Maples" are widely considered to be autobiographical, and several were the basis for a television movie entitled Too Far to Go starring Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner which was broadcast on NBC. Updike stated that he chose this surname for the characters because he admired the beauty and resilience of the tree.

While Updike has continued to publish at the rate of about a book a year, critical opinion on his work since the early nineties has been generally muted, and sometimes damning. Nevertheless, his novelistic scope in recent years has been wide: retellings of mythical stories (Tristan and Isolde in Brazil, 1994; a Hamlet prequel in Gertrude and Claudius, 2000), generational saga (In the Beauty of the Lilies, 1996) and science fiction (Toward the end of time, 1997). In Seek My Face (2002) he explored the post-war art scene; in Villages (2004), Updike returns to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England. His twenty-second novel, Terrorist, the story of a fervent, eighteen-year-old Muslim in New York, was published in June 2006.

A large anthology of short stories from his formative career, titled The Early Stories 1953–1975 (2003) won the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He wrote that his intention with the form was to "give the mundane its beautiful due."

Updike is a well-known and practising critic (Assorted Prose 1965, Picked-Up Pieces 1975, Hugging the Shore 1983, Odd Jobs 1991, More Matter 1999), and is often in the center of critical wars of words.

Updike has worked in a wide array of literary genres, including fiction, poetry, essay, and memoir. His lone foray into drama, Buchanan Dying: a play, apparently constituted something of a reversal, since in a 1968 interview Updike claimed that "[t]he unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they've said to each other for months is more than I can overlook." He further said: "From Twain to James and Faulkner to Bellow, the history of novelists as playwrights is a sad one."

Updike has four children and currently lives in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts with his second wife, Martha. His new book is a collection of essays on art, Still Looking (Knopf, 2005).

Reality and mythology in The Centaur.

The Centaur (1963) is a novel by John Updike. It won the National Book Award in 1964.

The story concerns George Caldwell, a 1940s schoolteacher, and his son Peter. The two spend three days together in a snowstorm, revealing the relationship between father and son. The novel is interwoven with characters drawn from Greek mythology, the most important of these being the centaur Chiron and Prometheus.

The character of Peter is similar to Updike himself; both had schoolteacher fathers, lived in rural Pennsylvania and suffered from psoriasis.

Near the end of the book, Updike includes an untranslated Greek sentence. The translation is as follows: "Having an incurable wound, he delivered himself into the cave. Wanting, and being unable, to have an end, because he was immortal, [then with] Prometheus offering himself to Zeus to become immortal for him, thus he died."

This quote is from Apollodorus, Library and Epitome, 2.5.4, and describes the death of Chiron.

The Centaur is a complete ritual, a patterned ceremony of word and action in which Peter Caldwell celebrates his former experiences with his father. The explicit use of the Greek Chiron-myth serves the functions of comedy, a sign of Caldwell's estrangement from the Olinger aristocrats, and a quality of Peter's memories. What sustained Peter during the three days that he spent in town with his father was his adolescent myth of Art, the City, and the Future, by which he hoped to answer the tyranny of time and the inevitability of death. Now, in his atheist maturity, with that myth tarnished, he must depend upon a reenactment of his father's sacrifices for him, another myth that enables him to face the transcendent questions of time, life, and death. Man is presented as a creature in the middle, a participant in the conceivable and the inconceivable, a mediator between heaven and earth. The ritual actions of The Centaur-notably the lectures on the universe by Caldwell and Chiron, the obituary, and George's acceptance of life in the final chapter-serve as actions of communion or as actions against death.

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American postmodernist “chaosmos’: Don DeLillo’s White Noise | The Rabbit series
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