Written in 1959 when Updike was only twenty-eight and published by Knopf one year later, Rabbit, Run, Updike's second novel, was still the one he was best known by the author somewhat ruefully remarked nearly twenty years after its publication. By the end of the first year, it had sold more than twenty thousand copies. To date, including paperback editions that have gone through over fifty printings, the figure has climbed to more than 2.5 million. Updike acknowledged the book was written with no thought of a sequel and only after some experiments with an autobiographical poem, “Midpoint,” and a play about James Buchanan did he decide to return to the novel form. The agitation of the sixties persuaded him that “Rabbit Angstrom of Pennsylvania, about whose future some people had expressed curiosity, might be the vehicle in which to package some of the American unease that was ranging all around us.”

Updike has indicated that his initial intention was to contrast Rabbit, Run with a companion novella, The Centaur, both to be published in a single volume, one novel illustrating a more responsible pattern of behavior, the other more that of instinctual gratification. The rabbit book proved too large to include with that of the horse and the compelling force exerted on Updike's imagination by its central character is evidenced by the three other books he has written at roughly ten-year intervals chronicling Rabbit's adventures, increasingly a mirror of the time and place in which they occur.