The Centaur

✍ Scribed by Updike, John

• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Year: 1963
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 202 KB
• Edition: Reissue
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 067964587X

✦ Synopsis

{ Oct 2020 - epub revisions. Verified ebook for complete book description, cover, table of contents, content separation, and epub format error checking. }

ebook, 304 pages
Published 1963
Random House (2012)
National Book Award for Fiction (1964)

The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell's fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author's remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron's agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is "a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son."
Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger for Roman (1965)