John Updike wrote some of the most precise, unsettling, and prophetic fiction in American literature—and most people under forty have never heard of him. That gap is what this podcast exists to close.
John Updike: American Writer, American Life is a literary podcast for readers, thinkers, and anyone who wants to understand the hidden architecture of American culture.
Hosted by cultural historian and Updike biographer Bob Batchelor, each episode is focused, sharp, and built for listeners who want to dive into the life and career of one of America's greatest writers.
John Updike published more than 20 novels, hundreds of short stories, and volumes of criticism, poetry, and essays across five decades. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice—for Rabbit Is Rich (1982) and Rabbit at Rest (1991)—and became the defining chronicler of middle-class American life in the twentieth century. His four-novel Rabbit tetralogy (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest) follows one ordinary man, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, across 40 years of American history. Together, these four books form a masterpiece: a portrait of the nation that is more honest, more painful, and more relevant than almost anything written since.
Updike saw the death of American manufacturing. He wrote about economic anxiety before it became a political movement. He diagnosed the collapse of masculine identity before the culture had a vocabulary for it. He saw the 1970s energy crisis, not as a temporary inconvenience, but as a permanent reckoning with American assumptions about prosperity and progress. And he did it all in beautiful, lyrial sentences.
He also wrote things that make contemporary readers uncomfortable. His male characters objectify and flee. His perspective is overwhelmingly white and suburban. This podcast doesn’t hide from those tensions. It engages them, because honest conversations about American literature require addressing human complexity, not running from it.
Each episode takes one aspect of Updike’s life, work, or world and opens it up: the Pennsylvania mill town that shaped him, the New Yorker years that refined his voice, the feminist critique that shadowed his reputation, the beautiful and brutal sentences that remain his most enduring legacy. From the Rabbit novels to Couples to Terrorist—from Updike’s poetry to his art criticism—no corner of the work is off limits.
Whether you’re a longtime reader returning to Updike with fresh eyes, a student encountering his fiction for the first time, or a curious listener who wants to understand why a novelist who died in 2009 still has something urgent to say about the America we’re living in right now—this podcast is for you.
Subscribe now and never miss an episode. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help other readers find the show. Want to dig deeper? Follow Bob Batchelor at bobbatchelor.com for essays, book recommendations, and updates on the podcast.
Bob Batchelor is a cultural historian, biographer, and professor at Coastal Carolina University. He is the author of John Updike: A Critical Biography (2013) and has spent more than three decades researching Updike’s life and legacy—including a doctoral dissertation on Updike’s vision of American culture. His books on Jim Morrison and The Doors (Roadhouse Blues), Stan Lee, Bob Dylan, The Great Gatsby, and Prohibition-era bootlegger George Remus (The Bourbon King) have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is also the host of the podcasts Tales of the Bourbon King and Theories of Celebrity Branding.
Batchelor has appeared on PBS NewsHour, NPR, the BBC, and the National Geographic Channel. His writing has been published in Time, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and PopMatters. He brings the same rigor, cultural authority, and narrative drive to this podcast that he brings to his books—designed to bring America's icons and myths to life for a new generation of thinkers!
