Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run is a novel by the American writer John Updike, published in 1960 by Alfred A. Knopf. It was the book that established him as a major American novelist, and it began a sequence that continued with Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.

The novel covers three months in the life of Harry Angstrom, known as Rabbit, who was once the best basketball player in his town and has not found anything since that gives him the same sense of being good at something. He leaves his wife and son on an impulse and spends the following weeks moving between a rented room, a former basketball coach who takes an interest in him, and a woman he meets through the coach. Updike writes the book in a present-tense narration that stays very close to Rabbit's point of view, so the reader is inside his restlessness and his self-justifications rather than judging them from outside.

The novel is set in a Pennsylvania of small towns and new suburbs, and its interest is in a man who has been taught that life should have a shape and cannot find one that fits.