From Reuters: John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize- winning author who chronicled middle-class life in small town and suburban America through the prism of such issues as sex, adultery, mortality and loss, died today. He was 76.

Updike died after a battle with lung cancer, according to an e-mail from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House.

A prolific writer, he authored more than 50 novels and volumes of short stories, poems, essays and criticism. Updike captured "he whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America, most notably in the four-book Rabbit series, which follows Everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom through the second half of the 20th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize for two novels in the tetralogy: "Rabbit Is Rich" (1981) and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990).

Some critics, like John Cheever, considered Updike "the most brilliant and versatile writer of his generation." He was called America's greatest poetic novelist, who skillfully wove metaphor, lyricism and detail into his narratives. Others say that his prose is superficial and overly descriptive to hide the fact that his work is about nothing.

Many of his books centered on middle-class domestic life, including marriage, adultery and divorce. Updike often peppered these novels with graphic descriptions of sexual intercourse -- to the point of gratuitousness, said some critics.

Most of his 1950s and 1960s work was set in Olinger, a fictional Pennsylvania town based on his boyhood home, including his first novel, "Poorhouse Fair" (1959), in which the elderly inmates of a poorhouse 20 years in the future rebel against the prefect's compulsive need for order. Updike also set several short story volumes in Olinger, such as "Pigeon Feathers" (1962), about adolescent fears of marriage and kids.

The 1960 publication of "Rabbit, Run" made Updike an acclaimed author. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is a depressed, blue- collar 26-year-old who misses his glory days as a high school basketball star. Updike wrote three sequels, each revisiting Rabbit a decade later. He received negative reviews for "Rabbit Redux" (1971), in which Rabbit confronts the social unrest of the late 1960s when a runaway hippie moves in.

Updike won critical acclaim, the 1982 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Circle Critics Award for "Rabbit Is Rich." In the 1970s, the middle-aged Rabbit enjoys a comfortable life selling Japanese cars during the oil crisis but must deal with his irresponsible son Nelson.

An overweight Rabbit, 55, suffers a heart attack and must deal with Nelson's cocaine addiction, the Pan Am Flight 103 crash in Lockerbie, Scotland, and finally his own death in "Rabbit at Rest" (1990), also a Pulitzer winner.