John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Both Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest received the Pulitzer Prize. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", Updike was widely recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output, having published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. He populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity." His work has attracted a significant amount of critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time as well as a notable prose stylist. Updike died of lung cancer in 2009.

John Updike's twentieth novel, Seek My Face, is a retelling of a woman's life through her own memories. It's a conversation between two women, Hope, a 79-year-old painter living in Vermont and Kathryn, a 27-year-old interviewer from New York who is ostensibly writing an article about Hope's life and work. Hope recounts the events of her life, specifically her marriages to two famous artists. As Kathryn listens to stories of Hope's marriage, she realizes that Hope subverted her own artistic talent to support her husbands' careers. While not everyone is a fan of John Updike's literary style, he remains one of the masters of American literature for the last fifty years. The San Francisco Chronicle calls Seek My Face a "rewarding new novel from our reigning master of surprise, the last sequence of which is surpassing in its beauty"