John Updike, whose novels and short stories have brilliantly chronicled the pleasures and frustrations of middle class life for five decades, was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania in 1932. His short stories are published frequently in The New Yorker and are often included in The Best American Short Stories and The O'Henry Prize Stories. In 1999, he edited and wrote the introduction for The Best American Short Stories of the Century. The Early Stories: 1953-1975 was published in 2003 and received the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
John Updike won the National Book Award for his novel, The Centaur, in 1963 and went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for Rabbit is Rich. He was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize and second National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest. He is one of the few people to have won both the National Medal of the Arts (1989) and the National Medal for the Humanities (2003).
Previous winners of the Rea Award for the Short Story are:
| Cynthia Ozick (1986) |
Andre Dubus (1996) |
| Robert Coover (1987) |
Gina Berriault (1997) |
| Donald Barthelme (1988) |
John Edgar Wideman (1998) |
| Tobias Wolff (1989) |
Joy Williams (1999) |
| Joyce Carol Oates (1990) |
Deborah Eisenberg (2000) |
| Paul Bowles (1991) |
Alice Munro (2001) |
| Eudora Welty (1992) |
Mavis Gallant (2002) |
| Grace Paley (1993) |
Antonya Nelson (2003) |
| Tillie Olsen (1994) |
Lorrie Moore (2004) |
| Richard Ford (1995) |
Ann Beattie (2005) |
In addition to the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Dungannon Foundation also sponsors the Rea Visiting Writers and Rea Visiting Lecturers programs at the University of Virginia and Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story at Symphony Space in New York City. |
