8 Mile draws on Rabbit, Run. Its screenplay, by Scott Silver, opens with a quote from the novel: "If you have the guts to be yourself...other people'll pay your price." The protagonist, played by the rapper Eminem, is nicknamed B-Rabbit. The soundtrack of the film features a song titled "Rabbit Run". Reception Rabbit, Run established Updike as one of the major American novelists of his generation. In the New York Times he was praised for his “artful and supple” style in his “tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst.” American novelist Joyce Carol Oates has written that Updike is “a master, like Flaubert, of mesmerizing us with his narrative voice even as he might repel us with the vanities of human desire his scalpel exposes.” Updike himself said Rabbit, Run was the novel most people associate him with, even though other novels in the series won Pulitzer Prizes. Literary significance The text of the novel went through several rewrites. Knopf originally required Updike to cut some "sexually explicit passages," but he restored and rewrote the book for the 1963 Penguin edition and again for the 1995 Everyman's omnibus edition. Though it had been done earlier, as in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Albert Camus' The Fall, Updike's novel is noted as being one of several well regarded, early uses of the present tense. Updike stated: Time magazine included the novel in its "Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". The philosopher Daniel Dennett makes extended reference to the Rabbit novels in his paper "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity". Film adaptation In 1970, the novel was made into a film directed by Jack Smight and starring James Caan as Rabbit, Carrie Snodgress as Janice and Jack Albertson as Marty. The script was adapted from the novel by Howard B. Kreitsek, who also served as the film's producer. The poster tagline was "3 months ago Rabbit Angstrom ran out to buy his wife cigarettes. He hasn't come home yet." In May 2018, screenwriter Andrew Davies announced that he was adapting the book for television. References Burhans, Clinton S. “Things Falling Apart: Structure and Theme in ‘Rabbit, Run.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 5, no. 3, 1973, pp. 336–351. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29531608. Accessed 04 Apr. 2021. Zhang, Min. “An Analysis of Rabbit’s Unhappy Marriage in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.” ICCESE 2017,