John Updike must've known he was sick. In town to celebrate the Edward Hopper exhibit at Seattle Art Museum, he looked tiny—a matchstick with a bright white swab of cotton plopped on top—on the enormous stage at Benaroya Hall, but he seemed healthy and spry.

"I know there's something wrong with someone who has written 60 books," Updike said of his body of work, but "the end is in sight" and it will be "a relief to not work on novels" anymore.

He made quite a few references to the impending close of his career that night. At the time, it seemed like a morbid indulgence from an author nearing 80 (almost a kind of humility, considering his work will live as long as the language), and the audience laughed politely. But lung cancer doesn't just sneak up on you like that; before our eyes, Updike was wrestling with a more corporeal concept of mortality.

Death is not an uncommon theme in his writing: In the October 5, 1992, issue of the New Yorker, Updike published a story called "Playing with Dynamite." It's a scorched-earth sketch about an old man coming to terms with his mortality.

Living now in death's immediate neighborhood, he was developing a soldier's jaunty indifference; if the bathtub in the corner of his eye as he shaved were to take on the form of a polar bear and start mauling him, it wouldn't be the end of the world. Even the end of the world, strange to say, wouldn't be the end of the world.

Young critics dismissed Updike for writing solely about white Massachusetts men who cheat on their wives. But during his career, Updike wrote from the point of view of a young Muslim terrorist, a supermarket checker, a man in the distant future, supporting characters in Hamlet, an exiled African president, and so many more—enough characters to populate a good-sized American town, a bedroom community where the melancholic postman might be getting it on with an angry witch of a housewife, but the police chief is a fundamentally decent man with a particular taste for ironies and great artistic achievements. Most novelists born during Updike's career simply aren't willing to write books that wander too far outside the boundaries of their own experience.

Younger readers tend to resent Updike's talent: He seems too establishment for people who are continually told how alternative they are. But anyone who appreciates good writing quickly learns to admire Updike as a craftsman. His sentences are beautiful, surprising things, and they represent a lot of work: That word choice and phrasing and those complicated structures are not just inspiration. There was a steady hand composing them, a hand that's now, finally, at rest. recommended