…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

He once wrote that it was "a subject which if I have not exhausted has exhausted me. His mother's attempts to be a publiJohn Updiked writer influenced the young Updike's own aspirations. Later Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich Massachusetts.

John Hoyer Updike (18 March 1932 – 27 January 2009) was an American novelist poet short story writer art critic and literary critic. Hundreds of his stories reviews and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 1954. Describing his subject as "the American small town Protestant middle class" Updike was well recognized for his careful craftsmanship his unique prose style and his prolificity.