John Updike once described himself as a literary spy within average, supermarket America. As a chronicler of the financially and sexually liberated middle classes, he had few peers: the novels in his so-called “Rabbit” saga paint as intricate a portrait of a generation as any to be found in an American novel.

Though he found a lifelong home in the sleek metropolitan pages of The New Yorker, Updike remained most at ease in the small-town atmosphere of New England where he grew up and spent most of his life. In his haunting memoir Self-Consciousness he half-jokingly identifies “smart” New York audiences as one of the groups prone to bring on his recurrent stammer.

Yet he was anything but provincial in his vocation. His prose could be Proustian in its complexity — to the extent that some critics, suspicious of his prolific output, accused him of burrowing too deep into his thesaurus. His prose registered tiny changes of fashion and mood that signified the shifting of society’s tectonic plates, and his expression was often wryly exquisite or comically precise, sometimes a gentle form of bitching about the foibles of his whole generation — from which he certainly did not spare himself. But in the 1980s the generation of short-story writers led by Raymond Carver, who was famously sparing with subordinate clauses, made Updike’s work look a little too much like the work of a jeweller.

Throughout his career Updike was also one of the most cosmopolitan of critics, his essays and journalism collected roughly every decade in weighty anthologies such as Picked-Up Pieces (1975), Hugging the Shore (1983), and Odd Jobs (1991).

Updike was a conscientious reviewer who shunned both Norman Mailer’s rampant egoism and Gore Vidal’s patrician venom. He shed light on subjects as diverse as an Iris Murdoch novel, the poems of Yevtushenko and the art of Winslow Homer. A whimsical trait also made its presence felt in, for instance, his affectionate pen-sketches of the denizens of the typical suburban golf course.

John Hoyer Updike was brought up in the Pennsylvanian town of Shillington (transformed into “Ollinger” in his stories) and educated at the high school where his father taught mathematics. A talented draughtsman, he initially harboured ambitions to be an artist, and later spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.

His acute eye for cumulative detail was to find expression in his fiction. Throughout his life he tended to view himself as a craftsman rather than Olympian artist. The mechanics of turning memory into prose — typefaces, fonts and proofs — apparently fascinated him as much as the intellectual process.

His love affair with The New Yorker began when he was only 12, after an aunt gave him a subscription to William Shawn’s magazine as a Christmas present. John Cheever’s stories, printed in the magazine at regular intervals, were later to exert a strong influence on his work. Bookish by nature, Updike’s introverted personality was also shaped by his experience of the chronic skin complaint psoriasis (an affliction he shared with the British playwright Dennis Potter).

He first had a short story accepted by The New Yorker in 1954, the year he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. The following year, after his sojourn in Oxford on a Knox Fellowship, he began a two-year stint on The New Yorker, based in the “Talk of the Town” section.

The job gave Updike an entrée into the life of the city, but in 1957 he took the decisive step of leaving Manhattan to live in the relatively conventional surroundings of the coastal mill town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. In those innocent, pre-inflationary days, he calculated that a writer could make a satisfactory living from selling a handful of stories to The New Yorker each year.

As he later wrote of his departure from New York, he was glad to escape “the literary demi-monde of agents and would-bes and with-it non-participants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering . . . When I write, I aim in my mind not towards New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a country-ish teen-aged boy finding them and having them speak to him.”

His first book was a collection of verse, The Carpentered Hen, in 1958, and throughout his career he continued to produce well-turned light verse (what he called “cartooning in print”). A novel, The Poorhouse Fair followed in 1959. (He had written one before, but decided against publishing it.) But the breakthrough came in 1960, which saw the first appearance, in Rabbit, Run, of Updike’s reluctant Everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a former high-school basketball prodigy who flounders amid the mundane demands of work and marriage. Updike was drawn back to Angstrom’s wayward suburban existence in Rabbit Redux (1971) a novel that drew on the cultural upheavals of the late Sixties.