John Updike - A kentaur

National Book Award, 1964

Centaur is a retelling of a Greek mythical story in a modern setting. Updike wrote it after the first book in the Rabbit series and before The Farm, originally published in the USA in 1963.

Kheiron was a wise, noble-hearted centaur who received a painful wound, yet was unable to die and renounced his immortality in favor of Prometheus.

In Updike's twentieth-century version, Olympus becomes a small-town high school, Kheiron becomes high school teacher George Caldwell, and Prometheus is none other than Caldwell's fifteen-year-old son, Peter.

Cheiron's agony is immortalized in the last three days of Caldwell's life, about which the American National Book Award jury wrote:

"...a bold account of a father-son conflict, during which the father is unable to express many things, but the son is even more so."

Author: John Updike