For better or worse, John Updike produced a nearly endless stream of work

For David Foster Wallace, he was one of "the Great Male Narcissists." Martin Amis declared that the last section of his 1989 memoir "Self-Consciousness" was "to my knowledge the best thing yet written on what it is like to get older: age, and the only end of age." Nicholson Baker celebrated his "assured touch, [his] adjectival resourcefulness."

By David L. Ulin

January 27, 2009