When John Updike died Tuesday at age 76, American literature lost its sharpest eye and most lyrical voice.

A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he once said that his ideal reader was a boy somewhere “to the east of Kansas” who discovered Updike’s books by accident in a school library. When I was 15, I was convinced that from his perch in Massachusetts, Updike was talking about me.

I hunted down and savored every word he had written–the novels (starting with “The Centaur,” a mythic ode to his schoolteacher father), the essays he wrote in his stint at the New Yorker (such as the classic account of Ted Williams‘ last at-bat, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”), the obscure poems (including “Ex-Basketball Player,” which gave birth to the presciently present-tense novel “Rabbit, Run”) and most importantly, the short stories (particularly the ones set in Olinger, Pa., a fictional version of his hometown of Shillington).

Tracking the path of the gawky, stuttering young author, I saw glimpses of God’s thumbprint upon creation.

Updike was a Christian, but I didn’t look to him for moral guidance. I looked to him for the right words. In Updike’s pearlescent prose, in his shimmering symbols, even in the carefully chosen typeface of the hardbound volumes, he sought “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”

In my own adolescent fiction, I mirrored his self-conscious gaze and mimicked his florid vocabulary. For years, I mentally composed the fan letter I wanted to send him–until novelist Nicholson Baker wrote him a lovely valentine, in book form, titled “U and I.”

In 50 years, Updike published more than 60 books. I stopped relating to them on a personal level when I got to the ones that were based on his infidelity (“Marry Me”) and his middle-age struggles with faith (”A Month of Sundays“); but I continued to defend him against hipsters who preferred fabulists like Thomas Pynchon or brats like Bret Easton Ellis. I privately cheered when the gracious Updike won nearly every major literary prize (except for the Nobel, to the Swedes’ discredit), and I didn’t begrudge him a big payday when “The Witches of Eastwick” went Hollywood in 1987. (There was also a 1970 movie version of “Rabbit, Run,” starring James Caan, that fared so badly at a test screening in Updike’s hometown that it was never released. I’ve got a bootleg copy.)

When Updike spoke at S.I.U. Edwardsville in 1999, I was the first in line to have him sign an armload of books (including “U and I,” which the onetime Harvard Lampoon cartoonist cleverly inscribed across the title text “John pdike”). I implored him to consider publishing his discarded first novel, a coming-of-age story called “Go Away” that I imagined was a cache of rough diamonds. Then, having overstayed my welcome, I hurriedly added that he’d inspired me to be a writer.

“High praise, indeed,” he said.

After he’d ascended to the pantheon of post-war novelists, Updike suffered a backlash, even from peers such as Norman Mailer and aspirants such as David Foster Wallace. A younger generation of critics dismissed the aging Updike as sexist, suburban, sesquipidalian.

Yet none of his critics ever wrote a paragraph more exquisite than this, the opening of one of my favorite stories, “In Football Season”:

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold on the dark slop of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

John Updike wrote that story when he was 30 years old. Yet within its reveries, there is already a whiff of the mortality that propelled his prodigious output. It ends thusly:

Now I peek into windows and open doors and do not find that air of permission. It has fled the world. Girls walk by me carrying their invisible bouquets from fields still steeped in grace, and I look up in the manner of one who follows with his eyes the passage of a hearse, and remembers what pierces him.