The Poorhouse Fair. Rabbit, Run, John Updike

This Novel Includes two stories: " The Poorhouse Fair" & "Rabbit, Run", written by John Updike.

In an act of imaginative daring for such a young writer, Updike took for his protagonist in The Poorhouse Fair a spirited ninety-four-year-old former schoolteacher now resident in a rural poorhouse. Over the course of a single eventful day, John Hook emerges as a philosophical opponent to Stephen Conner, the facility’s officious young administrator, who is convinced he has found in bureaucratic order the sure path to his and others’ happiness.

The racy and provocative Rabbit, Run (1960), one of the 100 best modern novels published in English according to Time magazine, introduces Updike’s most enduring protagonist, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high school basketball star who, feeling constrained by his middle-class life, leaves his pregnant wife and two-year-old son. Rabbit’s decision to go “on the road” promises an escape from the countervailing pressures of desire and duty, a chance to recapture some missing magic, but at what price?

• Author: John Updike  
• Publisher: Random House, Inc. 1965
• Edition: Hardcover, First Modern Library Edition
• Language: English