John Updike died on January 27, 2009. Before succumbing to lung cancer, he had been moved to a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, just a few miles from his home. While details of these last months may be made available in Adam Begley's forthcoming biography (Neyfakh 2009), what is remarkable for the purposes of this study is that, despite being terminally ill, Updike apparently continued to write. Within months after he died, Knopf issued a new collection of his short stories and a new volume of poetry. Two years later, editor Christopher Carduff assembled what is likely to be a final collection of his nonfiction.

Updike left behind a considerable archive of manuscripts, now at Harvard, among them two early unpublished novels (Tanenhaus 2010). However, unless some manuscript materials lurking among his papers turn out to be gems in the rough, it is likely that the Updike canon is complete. Hence, critical commentary on him is set to enter a new phase: assessments that for the first time can take into account the total body of his work. The initial direction those assessments are likely to take may be inferred from the tributes that poured forth after his death, and from some of the critical commentary that has appeared in the two years after Updike died.