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The crown of "greatness" never sat easily on the snowcapped head of John Updike, one of the great writers of the 20th century, who died from lung cancer on Tuesday at the age of 76. He grew up a clever, stuttering child in small-town Pennsylvania and went to college at Harvard, where he served as head of the Lampoon, the campus humor magazine, rather than its storied literary magazine, the Advocate. He dabbled in cartooning, and his first published work in the New Yorker consisted of light verse. (See pictures of John Updike.)

But he was a novelist at heart, and it was with the novel, along with the short story, that he would have his lasting, lifelong romance. This appears to have dawned on Updike slowly, but it was abundantly clear by the publication of his second novel, Rabbit, Run, the first volume of five that chronicled the life of Rabbit Angstrom, Updike's great hero. Rather than a fictional alter ego, Angstrom was a vulgarian, a crass, lusty, middle-class salesman, through whom Updike anatomized and dramatized the great American spiritual and cultural crises of his generation. (See the top 10 John Updike Books.)

Updike's hallmark was his glittering, gloriously vivid style. His talent for spotting detail, for capturing in prose the slightest shift in light or in a character's mood was unmatched. It was not the most fashionable of gifts. While his contemporaries practiced the rock-ribbed realism of Hemingway and Carver or the high-concept contraptions of the metafictionists, Updike conducted his pursuit of eloquence and wit almost alone. Ironically, it was sometimes held against him, and he was tagged a lightweight. (See the top 10 fiction books of 2008.)

Also counted against him was his extraordinary productivity. He saw himself as more an artisan than an artist, and he produced nearly a book a year for much of his life — not just novels but short stories, book reviews, memoir and art criticism. His relentless curiosity sometimes led him to attempt experiments that were beyond his range: science fiction in Toward the End of Time, for example, and a retelling of the Hamlet story in Gertrude and Claudius. But at his very best, as in the Rabbit novels — two of which won Pulitzer Prizes — or his 1968 shocker, Couples, in which he dove fearlessly into the sexual revolution, he looked deeply and clearly into the swamps of human experience and reported back to us what he saw with a matchless precision and a warm, generous judgment. (Read a 1968 TIME cover story on Updike.)

For much of his life, Updike lived in rural Massachusetts with his second wife; he leaves behind four children. He continued to write novels up until this past fall, when he published his last, The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to his famous Witches of Eastwick from 1984. By then he was living in a world that had transformed and transformed again; from a rooftop in Brooklyn, Updike, with his own twinkly eye, watched the Twin Towers fall, an experience that inspired his novel Terrorist, which focused on a young Arab American. (See the top 10 longest sequel gaps.)

I met Updike only once, in 2006, on the occasion of the publication of Terrorist. It was a pleasure to interview him. He was one of the world's great talkers, and he lavished the same care on the answers he gave to a nervous journalist as he did on his work. I caught him in a nostalgic frame of mind, thinking about the vanished America of his Pennsylvania childhood, and as always, he turned his bright jeweler's eye on the nostalgia itself.

"In the world of my boyhood, there were books everywhere. Your piano teacher had books, and there were lending libraries everywhere — your department store had a lending library. Books are still bought, and you see them being read in airplanes, but it's a last resort, isn't it? And the category of 'literary fiction' has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier.

"Now I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit. I was hoping to talk to America. Like Walt Whitman, you know? Address it and describe it to itself."

He did. And America listened.

Read "Older Writers Revisiting Their Younger Selves."

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• Lev Grossman
• John Updike, one of the great writers of the 20th century, died this morning from lung cancer. He was 76