WASHINGTON — John Updike, whose finely polished novels and stories exploring the virtues, vices and spent hopes of America’s small towns and suburbs earned him two Pulitzer Prizes and kept him at the pinnacle of the nation’s literary life for five decades, died Tuesday at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass. He was 76 and had lung cancer.

Updike was best known for peering into the bedrooms and unquiet minds of suburban couples and small-town entrepreneurs in dozens of novels and stories that mirrored America’s march from postwar optimism to the dimming dreams of a chastened generation.

His most famous works were probably the quartet of novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, whose life was a continual search, whether in business or the beds of other men’s wives, for the crystallized feeling of joy he had known as a small-town high school basketball star.

Adultery themes

Updike was often labeled the bard of suburban adultery — “a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me,” he once said — and many of his early works of fiction were considered scandalously explicit. Updike’s reputation as a novelist and a sexual provocateur in print was secured with his novel “Couples,” which became a No. 1 best-seller in 1968. The book, which tells the intertwined stories of the longings of five New England couples, landed Updike on the cover of Time magazine under the heading “The Adulterous Society.”

“People read it as a report from the field,” The Washington Post’s David Streitfeld wrote in 1998, “wondering in amazement if their neighbors were really living such erotic lives.”

Updike’s literary reach went far beyond a study of the nation’s sexual mores. His first novel, “The Poorhouse Fair” (1959), features a 90-year-old protagonist; “Brazil” (1994) sets the timeless Tristan and Isolde love story in modern South America; and the 2006 novel, “Terrorist,” views the world through a post-9/11 prism.

In one of his more popular novels, 1984’s “The Witches of Eastwick,” three women are seduced and abandoned by a man on whom they wreak devilish revenge. (It was made into 1987 film starring Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Cher.) Updike wrote a sequel, “The Widows of Eastwick,” in 2008.

In later works such as “Roger’s Version” (1986) and “In the Beauty of the Lilies” (1996), Updike reveals his characters’ religious lives with as much unsparing clarity as he had previously unlocked the bedroom door.

He was the author of almost 60 books of fiction, poetry, essays and memoirs, turning out a new book each year. He wrote hundreds of short stories, book reviews and “Talk of the Town” vignettes for the New Yorker magazine, to which he had contributed since 1954.

“No writer was more important to the soul of the New Yorker than John,” New Yorker editor David Remnick said in a statement.

Essays

Updike’s essays — collected in 10 thick anthologies — dug deeply into subjects as varied as art history, philosophy, European and Japanese literature, movie stars and golf. His best remembered essay was undoubtedly “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” a touching 1960 evocation of baseball star Ted Williams’s final game at Boston’s Fenway Park, which Updike memorably called “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.”

In Williams’ final time at bat, the aging Boston Red Sox superstar hit a home run.

“Like a feather caught in a vortex,” Updike wrote, “Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs — hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap.”

Language

Updike may have been the finest prose stylist of his generation, with a precisely calibrated command of observation, pacing and diction that made his novels and essays extended poetic evocations.

“No one else using the English language over the past 2½ decades has written so well in so many ways as he,” critic Paul Gray wrote in 1982, in one of Time magazine’s two cover stories about Updike.

In “Rabbit at Rest” (1990), Updike turns his eye to something as mundane as a character munching on a bag of chips: “Keep on Krunchin’, the crinkly pumpkin-colored bag advises him. He loves the salty ghost of Indian corn and the way each thick flake, an inch or so square, solider than a potato chip and flatter than a Frito and less burny to the tongue than a triangular red-peppered Dorito sits edgy in his mouth and then shatters and dissolves between his teeth.”

But Updike’s stylistic felicity and assembly-line productivity weren’t always well received. By the 1990s, novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe called Updike “insular, effete and irrelevant,” and writer David Foster Wallace asked whether he “ever had one unpublished thought.”

In 1953, Updike married Mary E. Pennington, who was the mother of their four children. They separated and divorced in the mid-1970s. In 1977, he married Martha Bernhard, a psychologist, who survives him.

“The Poorhouse Fair,” 1959

“Rabbit, Run,” 1960

“The Centaur,” 1963

“Of the Farm,” 1965

“Couples,” 1968

“Bech, a Book,” 1970

“Rabbit, Redux,” 1971

“A Month of Sundays,” 1975

“Marry Me,” 1977

“The Coup,” 1978

“Rabbit Is Rich,” 1981

“Bech Is Back,” 1982

“The Witches of Eastwick,” 1984

“Roger’s Version,” 1986

“S.”, 1988

“Rabbit at Rest,” 1990

“Memories of the Ford Administration,” 1992

“Brazil,” 1994

“In the Beauty of the Lilies,” 1996

“Toward the End of Time,” 1997

“Bech at Bay,” 1998

“Gertrude and Claudius,” 2000

“Seek My Face,” 2003

“Villages,” 2004

“Terrorist,” 2006

“The Widows of Eastwick,” 2008

Source: The Associated Press