John Updike

People often ask me if I ever got starstruck when I was interviewing famous people — and yes, it happened sometimes.

One of those times in early 1994, when I had the opportunity to interview a true literary lioin: novelist, short-story writer, poet, and critic John Updike.

How big a literary figure is he?

Well, John Updike is one of only three writers who have ever won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.

And both prizes were for books in Updike’s “Rabbit” series of novels featuring Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

I met John Updike after he’d written an unusual novel called “Brazil.”

So here now, from 1994, John Updike:

John Updike died in 2009 just weeks before his 77th birthday.