The Centaur
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The Centaur by John Updike
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE TRANGERThe Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell's fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author's remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron's agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.
In 1954, John Updike graduated from Harvard College and spent a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. He was a member of The New Yorker's staff from 1955 until 1957. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his works. Updike earned the Rea Prize for Short Fiction in 2006, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his Early Tales (1953-1975). In January 2009, he passed away.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780449203712 |
| ISBN 10 | 0449203719 |
| Title | The Centaur |
| Author | John Updike |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Fawcett Books |
| Year published | 1983-03-12 |
| Number of pages | 0 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |