First Saul Bellow, then Kurt Vonnegut and Joe Heller, then William Styron and Norman Mailer, and now John Updike. From this outstanding posse, only Gore Vidal (84), Philip Roth (75) and JD Salinger (90) are still standing. The light is dying in the west and, like the political landscape, the American literary scene is a-changin'.
Updike, born in 1932, was too young to take part in the Second World War, but he was a junior member of a generation including George Plimpton and James Salter, and erratically led by Norman Mailer, that came of age during the 1950s, smoking, drinking and womanising as if there were no tomorrow.
I remember Mailer telling me not long before he died how urgent it seemed, after the bomb, the Holocaust and the world crisis of the 1940s, to celebrate the peace and to remake the American republic with new words and narratives. Something similar happened in Britain in the 1950s with the Angry Young Men. Unlike their American cousins, they did not morph into grand old men. Or perhaps they did and we didn't notice or pay the same respect. The American literary world is, strange to say, a little bit nicer than the British.
Updike's first work, for the Talk of the Town, appeared in the New Yorker in 1955 and was soon followed by his early stories. A distinguished literary career spanning six decades is a remarkable achievement, something he shares with Bellow, Mailer and Roth. As well as his vigorous longevity, Updike's practical approach to his work is appealing. He treated writing, for the New Yorker and for his publishers, Alfred A Knopf, as a job, a matter of craft as much as art.
From his obiter dicta, I particularly admire his "writers should be read and not seen". During the years when writers' vanity and self-importance sometimes ballooned out of control, Updike's modesty and discretion, a mask for his genius, seem to have kept him sane and happy, a vital mood for a writer exploring the neuroses of that 20th-century American Everyman, the white, middle-class, suburban male. Couples, published in 1968, is not his best book (opinion seems to divide between the Rabbit tetralogy and the Bech novels), but it was a huge bestseller, put him on the cover of Time and was twinned with Roth's Portnoy's Complaint.
Updike was lucky as well as gifted. To see the shadowside of his literary success in the 1960s, consider the sad case of Richard Yates, another laureate of the suburbs. The film of Yates's masterpiece, Revolutionary Road, opens this week. Yates would surely have had some bitter things to say about their contrasting reputations.
As well as finding his subject (suburban angst) at a precociously early age, Updike was also blessed with the literary equivalent of perfect pitch, a sure ear for American English. But he also had something else in common with the other giants of his times: he worked exceptionally hard in many genres. He wrote stories, novels, essays and poetry. He was a wonderful critic. Martin Amis describes his memoir, Self-Consciousness, as "the best thing yet written on what it is like to get old".
So as well as being a storyteller of immense stature, Updike was also that rare thing - a man of letters - in the sense that Dickens would have understood, and a writer in sympathy with his audience. "When I write," he once said, "I aim my mind not towards New York but towards a vague spot east of Kansas."
Perhaps that's why the English reading public loved him and treated him as one of their own and why he will be so badly missed.