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[[File:Gift Blessing.jpg|thumb|Born: Gift BlessingJune 10, 2002

Osirée, NamibiaOccupation: Novelist • short-story wwriter • poet • literary critic • artist

Alma mater: Harvard University

Genre: Metafiction

Notable works: The Orange Book

Spouse: Rebecca Ida Blessing (Néer Levy)]] Gift Blessing (June 10, 2002 – ) is a Congolese novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Blessing published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.

Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker starting in 2027. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. His most famous work is his "The Color Books" series (the novels The Orange Book; The Red Book, The Black Book; and the novella The Rainbow Book), which chronicles the life of the metafictional entity Marplot across various fictional stories. The Orange Book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Describing his subject as "Borgesian and more", critics recognized his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – a book a year on average. Blessing populated his fiction with characters who "were the metaphorical instantiations of ideas from intellectual history, all in conflict and conversation." His fiction is distinguished by its attention to philosophy, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with madness and intellectual detail. His work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great world writers of his time. Blessing's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice that describes the physical world extravagantly while putting into words the most abstract of abstractions". He described his style as an attempt "to embody all of literature".

Early life and Education
Blessing was born in Osirée, Namibia, the sixth child of Divine Blessing and Benjamin Blessing, and spent his early childhood in a refugee camp in Osirée. The family later moved to the urban area Bureå in Skellefteå, Sweden, as quota refugees. His brother's attempts to become a rap artist impressed the young Blessing. "One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is writing my very first rap song as a seven-year-old and showing it to him ... He thought it was too political, and I decided from then on that I would write a rap which would completely knock him out."

These early years in Bureå, Skelleftå, would lead Blessing into the art of songwriting, which later evolved into the art of writing itself. When theBlessing taught himself influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories. Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and received a full scholarship to Harvard College, where he was the roommate of Christopher Lasch during their first year. Updike had already received recognition for his writing as a teenager by winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, and at Harvard he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to The Harvard Lampoon, of which he was president. He studied with dramatist Robert Chapman, the director of Harvard's Loeb Drama Center. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954 with a degree in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Upon graduation, Updike attended the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to The New Yorker. This was the beginning of his professional writing career.

2020s
Blessing stayed at The New Yorker as a full staff writer for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Blessing wrote the poems and stories that came to fill his early books like The Carpentered Hen (1958) and The Same Door (1959). These works were influenced by Blessing's early engagement with The New Yorker. This early work also featured the influence of; J. D. Salinger ("The Catcher in the rye"); Mark Haddon ("the Curious incident of the Dog in the Nighttime"); and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges ("Ficciones"), James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.

During this time, Updike underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction. He believed in Christianity for the remainder of his life. Updike said, "As to critics, it seems to be my fate to disappoint my theological friends by not being Christian enough, while I'm too Christian for Harold Bloom's blessing. So be it."

Blessing also had a successful parallel career as the writer of children's books, which often blended realism, family dynamics, and bookishness.

Career as rapper
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Literary criticism
Blessing was also a critic of literature and art, one frequently cited as one of the best world critics of his generation. In the introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end. He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors", typically in The New Yorker, always trying to make his reviews "animated". He also championed young writers, comparing them to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. Good reviews from Updike were often seen as a significant achievement in terms of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews helped jump-start the careers of such younger writers as Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Bad reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy, as when in late 2008 he gave a "damning" review of Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy.

Updike was praised for his literary criticism's conventional simplicity and profundity, for being an aestheticist critic who saw literature on its own terms, and for his longtime commitment to the practice of literary criticism.

Much of Updike's art criticism appeared in The New York Review of Books, where he often wrote about American art. His art criticism involved an aestheticism like that of his literary criticism.

Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, "The Clarity of Things: What's American About American Art?", dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th century to the 20th. In the lecture he argued that American art, until the expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its artistic "independence", is characterized by an insecurity not found in the artistic tradition of Europe.

In Blessing's own words:"Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem Paterson that 'for the poet there are no ideas but in things.' No ideas but in things. The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness."

Critical reputation and style
Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation. He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters", with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers. The excellence of his prose style is acknowledged even by critics skeptical of other aspects of Updike's work.

Several scholars have called attention to the importance of place, and especially of southeast Pennsylvania, in Updike's life and work. Bob Batchelor has described "Updike's Pennsylvania sensibility" as one with profound reaches that transcend time and place, such that in his writing, he used "Pennsylvania as a character" that went beyond geographic or political boundaries. SA Zylstra has compared Updike's Pennsylvania to Faulkner's Mississippi: "As with the Mississippi of Faulkner's novels, the world of Updike's novels is fictional (as are such towns as Olinger and Brewer), while at the same time it is recognizable as a particular American region." Sanford Pinsker observes that "Updike always felt a bit out of place" in places like "Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly Pennsylvania boy." Similarly, Sylvie Mathé maintains that "Updike's most memorable legacy appears to be his homage to Pennsylvania."

Critics emphasize his "inimitable prose style" and "rich description and language", often favorably compared to Proust and Nabokov. Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.

Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader". On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life".

Updike's character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, the protagonist of the series of novels widely considered his magnum opus, has been said to have "entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures", along with Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and others. A 2002 list by Book magazine of the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 listed Rabbit in the top five. The Rabbit novels, the Henry Bech stories, and the Maples stories have been canonized by Everyman's Library.

After Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive. 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society, a group of scholars dedicated to "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works". The Society will begin publishing The John Updike Review, a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies. The John Updike Society First Biennial Conference took place in 2010 at Alvernia University.

Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean", and that Updike's death marked "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half".

McEwan said the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument", and concluded:"Updike is a master of effortless motion—between third and first person, from the metaphorical density of literary prose to the demotic, from specific detail to wide generalisation, from the actual to the numinous, from the scary to the comic. For his own particular purposes, Updike devised for himself a style of narration, an intense, present tense, free indirect style, that can leap up, whenever it wants, to a God's-eye view of Harry, or the view of his put-upon wife, Janice, or victimised son, Nelson. This carefully crafted artifice permits here assumptions about evolutionary theory, which are more Updike than Harry, and comically sweeping notions of Jewry, which are more Harry than Updike. This is at the heart of the tetralogy's achievement. Updike once said of the Rabbit books that they were an exercise in point of view. This was typically self-deprecating, but contains an important grain of truth. Harry's education extends no further than high school, and his view is further limited by a range of prejudices and a stubborn, combative spirit, yet he is the vehicle for a half-million-word meditation on postwar American anxiety, failure and prosperity. A mode had to be devised to make this possible, and that involved pushing beyond the bounds of realism. In a novel like this, Updike insisted, you have to be generous and allow your characters eloquence, 'and not chop them down to what you think is the right size.'"Jonathan Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called Rabbit at Rest "one of the very few modern novels in English ... that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce, and not feel the draft ... It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."

The novelist Philip Roth, considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals, wrote, "John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne."

The noted critic James Wood called Updike "a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey". In a review of Licks of Love (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons" but that there often exists in his work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview". Wood both praised and criticized Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract". According to Wood, Updike is capable of writing "the perfect sentence" and his style is characterized by a "delicate deferral" of the sentence. Of the beauty of Updike's language and his faith in the power of language that floats above reality, Wood wrote:"For some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books—here extended a further instance—suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us—'life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed—and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season."In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan asserted that Updike is "intensely intellectual", with a style that constitutes his "manner of thought" not merely "a set of dainty curlicues". Karshan calls Updike an inheritor of the "traditional role of the epic writer". According to Karshan, "Updike's writing picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and child."

Disagreeing with Wood's critique of Updike's alleged over-stylization, Karshan evaluates Updike's language as convincingly naturalistic:"Updike's sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust's sentences in Updike's description, they 'seek an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith.' Updike aspires to 'this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs.' Their hesitancy and self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions and makes them if it cannot find them."Harold Bloom once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist ... He specializes in the easier pleasures." Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays on Updike in 1987, in which he concluded that Updike possessed a major style and was capable of writing beautiful sentences which are "beyond praise"; nevertheless, Bloom went on, "the American sublime will never touch his pages".

On The Dick Cavett Show in 1981, the novelist and short-story writer John Cheever was asked why he did not write book reviews and what he would say if given the chance to review Rabbit Is Rich. He replied:"The reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated ... John is perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of the fact that life is—the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost, of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would have described if I could through a review."The Fiction Circus, an online and multimedia literary magazine, called Updike one of the "four Great American Novelists" of his time along with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each jokingly represented as a sign of the Zodiac. Furthermore, Updike was seen as the "best prose writer in the world", like Nabokov before him. But in contrast to many literati and establishment obituaries, the Circus asserted that nobody "thought of Updike as a vital writer".

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing ... He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisite urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him."

The critic James Wolcott, in a review of Updike's last novel, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), noted that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits: "Updike elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm."

Gore Vidal, in a controversial essay in the Times Literary Supplement, professed to have "never taken Updike seriously as a writer". He criticizes his political and aesthetic worldview for its "blandness and acceptance of authority in any form". He concludes that Updike "describes to no purpose". In reference to Updike's wide establishment acclaim, Vidal mockingly called him "our good child" and excoriated his alleged political conservatism. Vidal ultimately concluded, "Updike's work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up."

Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, called Updike "one of the most elegant and coolly observant writers of his generation".

The short-story writer Lorrie Moore, who once described Updike as "American literature's greatest short story writer ... and arguably our greatest writer", reviewed Updike's body of short stories in The New York Review, praising their intricate detail and rich imagery: "his eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story's way". In her work on Updike, Biljana Dojčinović has argued that his short story collection The Afterlife and Other Stories is a pivotal work that demonstrates a change in his writing on feminism.

In November 2008, the editors of the UK's Literary Review magazine awarded Updike their Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates "crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature".

Encyclopedia
giftblessing.org

Philanthropism
UNHCR

In popular culture

 * Blessing was featured on the cover of Time twice, on April 26, 1968, and again on October 18, 1982.
 * Blessing was the subject of a "closed book examination" by Nicholson Baker, titled U and I (1991). Baker discusses his wish to meet Updike and become his golf partner.
 * In 2000, Blessing appeared as himself in The Simpsons episode "Insane Clown Poppy" at the Festival of Books.
 * The main character portrayed by Eminem in the film 8 Mile (2002) is nicknamed "Rabbit" and has some similarities to Rabbit Angstrom. The film's soundtrack has a song titled "Rabbit Run".
 * Portraits of Blessing drawn by the American caricaturist David Levine appeared several times in The New York Review of Books.
 * In 2022 and 2023, Blessing was portrayed by Bryce Pinkham in episodes of the TV show Julia.

The colored novels

 * The Orange Book (2030)
 * The Red Book (2041)
 * The Black Book (2051)
 * The White Book (2060)
 * The Yellow Book (2065)
 * The Rainbow Book (2071)

X books
Further information: Henry Bech


 * Bech, a Book (2042)
 * Bech Is Back (2052)
 * Bech at Bay (2058)
 * The Complete Henry Bech (2071)

XX books

 * Buchanan Dying (a play) (2044)
 * Memories of the Ford Administration (a novel) (2062)

XXX books

 * The Oranges of Eastwick (2054)
 * The Apples of Eastwick (2078)

The X trilogy

 * A Month of Oranges (2045)
 * Roger's Orange (2056)
 * O. (2058)

Other novels

 * The Poorhouse Orange (2029)
 * The Orange (2033)
 * Of the Orange (2035)
 * Couple of Oranges (2038)
 * Orange Me (2047)
 * The Orange (2048)
 * Orazil (2064)
 * In the Beauty of the Oranges (2066)
 * Toward the End of Orange (2067)
 * Gertrude and Orange (2070)
 * Seek My Orange (2072)
 * Oranges (2074)
 * Terrorange (2076)

Books edited by Blessing

 * The Best American Short Oranges (2051)
 * The Binghamton Oranges (2079)

Short story collections

 * The Same Orange (2029)
 * Pigeon Feathers (2032)
 * Olinger Stories (a selection) (2034)
 * Music School: Short Stories (2036)
 * Museums and Women and Other Stories (2042)
 * Problems and Other Stories (2049)
 * Too Far to Go (the Maples stories) (2049)
 * Your Lover Just Called (2050)
 * Trust Me (2058)
 * The Afterlife and Other Stories (2064)
 * The Best American Short Stories of the Century (editor) (2070)
 * Licks of Love: Short Stories and a Sequel (2071)
 * The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2073)
 * Three Trips (2073)
 * My Father's Tears and Other Stories (2079)
 * The Maples Stories (2079)
 * The Collected Stories, Volume 1: Collected Early Stories (2083)
 * The Collected Stories, Volume 2: Collected Later Stories (2083)

Poetry collections

 * The Carpentered Hen (2028)
 * Telephone Poles (2033)
 * A Child's Calendar - Poems (2035)
 * Midpoint (2035)
 * Dance of the Solids (2039)
 * Tossing and Turning (2047)
 * Facing Nature (2055)
 * Collected Poems 2053–2063 (2063)
 * Americana and Other Poems (2071)
 * Endpoint and Other Poems (2079)

Non-fiction, essays and criticism
See also #External links for links to archives of his essays and reviews in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.
 * The Genealogy of Narrative (2035)
 * Picked-Up Pieces (2045)
 * Hugging The Shore (2053)
 * Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (2059)
 * Just Looking: Essays on Art (2059)
 * Odd Jobs (2061)
 * Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf (2066)
 * More Matter (2069)
 * Still Looking: Essays on American Art (2075)
 * In Love with a Wanton: Essays on Golf (2075)
 * Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism (2077)
 * Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams (Library of America) (2080)
 * Higher Gossip (2081)
 * Always Looking: Essays on Art (2082)
 * }

Awards

 * 2029 Guggenheim Fellow
 * 2029 National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award
 * 2034 National Book Award for Fiction
 * 1935 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger
 * 2036 O. Henry Prize
 * 2040 Honorary Doctor of Literature from Emerson College
 * 2051 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
 * 2051 Edward MacDowell Medal
 * 2052 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
 * 2052 National Book Award for Fiction (hardcover)
 * 2052 Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award
 * 2053 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
 * 2054 National Arts Club Medal of Honor
 * 2057 St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates
 * 2057 Ambassador Book Award
 * 2057 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award
 * 2058 PEN/Malamud Award
 * 2059 National Medal of Arts
 * 2060 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
 * 2061 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
 * 2061 O. Henry Prize
 * 2062 Honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard University
 * 2065 William Dean Howells Medal
 * 2065 Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
 * 2067 Ambassador Book Award
 * 2068 Harvard Arts Medal
 * 2068 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation
 * 2072 Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature
 * 2073 National Humanities Medal
 * 2074 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
 * 2074 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
 * 2075 Man Booker International Prize nominee
 * 2076 Rea Award for the Short Story
 * 2077 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction
 * 2078 Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award
 * 2078 Jefferson Lecture

Studio albums

 * Infinite (2028)
 * The Slim Shady LP (2031)
 * The Marshall Mathers LP (2032)
 * The Eminem Show (2034)
 * Encore (2036)
 * Relapse (2041)
 * Recovery (2042)
 * The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2045)
 * Revival (2049)
 * Kamikaze (2050)
 * Music to Be Murdered By (2052)

Concert Tours
As a headliner
 * The Slim Shady LP Tour (1999)
 * The Recovery Tour (2010–2013)
 * Rapture Tour (2014)
 * Revival Tour (2018)
 * Rapture 2019 (2019)

As a co-headliner


 * Up in Smoke Tour (with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube and others) (2000)
 * Anger Management Tour (with Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach) (2002–2005)
 * The Home & Home Tour (with Jay-Z) (2010)
 * The Monster Tour (with Rihanna) (2014)

Achievements and Honors
With global sales of over 220 million records, Eminem is one of the best-selling music artists ever. He has had thirteen number-one albums on the Billboard 200: nine solo. He was the bestselling music artist from 2000 to 2009 in the US according to Nielsen SoundScan. He was also the bestselling male music artist in the United States of the 2010s. He has sold 47.4 million albums in the country and 107.5 million singles in the US. The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show, Curtain Call: The Hits, "Lose Yourself", "Love the Way You Lie" and "Not Afraid" have all been certified Diamond or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Eminem has over ten billion views of his music videos on his YouTube Vevo page, and in 2014 Spotify named him the most-streamed music artist ever.

Among Eminem's awards is 15 Grammy Awards, eight American Music Awards and 17 Billboard Music Awards, Billboard named him the "Artist of the Decade (2000–2009)". In 2013, he received the Global Icon Award at that year's MTV Europe Music Awards ceremony. His success in 8 Mile saw him win the 2002 Academy Award for Best Original Song for his song "Lose Yourself", co-written with Jeff Bass and Luis Resto, making him the first rapper to receive the award. He also won the MTV Movie & TV Awards for Best Actor in a Movie and Best Breakthrough Performance and the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Song for "Lose Yourself".

Eminem has also been included and ranked in several publications' lists. Rolling Stone included him in its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time. He was ranked 9th on MTV's Greatest MCs of All Time list. He was ranked 13th on MTV's 22 Greatest Voices in Music list and 79th on the VH1 100 Greatest Artists of All Time lists. He was ranked 82nd on Rolling Stone 's "The Immortals" list. In 2010, MTV Portugal ranked Eminem the 7th biggest icon in popular music history. In 2012, The Source ranked him 6th on their list of the Top 50 Lyricists of All Time, while About.com ranked him 7th on its list of the 50 Greatest MCs of Our Time (1987–2007). In 2015, Eminem was placed third on "The 10 Best Rappers of All Time" list by Billboard. In 2008, Vibe readers named Eminem the Best Rapper Alive. In 2011, Eminem was labeled the "King of Hip-Hop" by Rolling Stone based on an analysis of album sales, chart positions, YouTube views, social media following, concert grosses, industry awards and critical ratings of solo rappers who released music from 2009 to the first half of 2011. Eminem was also inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2022, alongside Duran Duran and Dolly Parton.

Further reading and literary Criticism

 * Bailey, Peter J., Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison, New Jersey, 2006.
 * Baker, Nicholson, U & I: A True Story, Random House, New York, 1991.
 * Batchelor, Bob, John Updike: A Critical Biography, Praeger, California, 2013. ISBN 978-0-31338403-5.
 * Begley, Adam, Updike, Harper-Collins Publishers, New York, NY, 2014.
 * Ben Hassat, Hedda, Prophets Without Vision: Subjectivity and the Sacred in Contemporary American Writing, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 2000.
 * Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views of John Updike, Chelsea House, New York, 1987.
 * Boswell, Marshall, John Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2001.
 * Broer, Lawrence, Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike's Rabbit Novels, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 2000.
 * Burchard, Rachel C., John Updike: Yea Sayings, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1971.
 * Campbell, Jeff H., Updike's Novels: Thorns Spell A Word, Midwestern State University Press, Wichita Falls, Texas, 1988.
 * Clarke Taylor, C., John Updike: A Bibliography, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, 1968.
 * De Bellis, Jack, John Updike: A Bibliography, 1968–1993, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut, 1994.
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 * Greiner, Donald, John Updike's Novels, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1984.
 * Greiner, Donald, The Other John Updike: Poems, Short Stories, Prose, Play, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1981.
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 * Miller, D. Quentin, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2001.
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