S01 · E174

What Makes Rabbit Run?

John Updike 's new book, Rabbit is Rich, is the third in the Rabbit series from the author of Rabbit, Run, Couples and The Coup. At 50, Updike is at the height of h s powers and reputation. His novels amount to a chronicle of Middle America in the liberated and disillusioned post-Kennedy years. 'Many of my books and stories involve a bourgeois home being disrupted by sex ... Maybe 1 should pay more attention to the fact that these homes were basically established by sex as well.' Art, sex and religion; he has described these as the Three Great Secret Things, and in this film, the first full-length study of Updike, he looks at his own life and art in the light of his strictly religious Pennsylvania past, and wonders about the drives that make Rabbit run.