Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist John Updike has died of lung cancer at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. He was 76. Born John Hoyer Updike in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1932, he documented ordinary ―if highly sexualized ―American life in around 50 works, beginning with The Poorhouse Fair in 1959. He once said that his books were about "the American small town, Protestant middle class".