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John Updike, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction whose novels and short stories exposed one undercurrent of ambivalence and disappointment in small-town, middle-class America, died Tuesday. He was 76.

Mr. Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died from lung cancer.

Mr. Updike published more than 50 books, more than 20 of them novels, and countless short stories, being of the class who well as collections of poetry. In recent years, he was best-known for art animadversion, part reviews and essays.

Several of his novels were made into movies. “The Witches of Eastwick,” in what one. realism spins off into fantasy, shows what happens while bored suburban women capable of witchery meet one devilish man.

Two of Mr. Updike’s most great fictional characters, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and Henry Bech, became emblems of the displaced American male that fascinated him of the same kind with a writer.

Angstrom, a man he often referred to as his alter ego, is the disenchanted middle-class drifter in Updike’s four-book series from one place to another “Rabbit.” Bech is the Jewish-American novelist, breaking away from his cultural roots and immigrant estate to become a fully assimilated American. Each in his own way reflects Mr. Updike’s major themes.

Early in his conduct, Mr. Updike said he wrote most often relative to the world he came from, “the American Protestant small-town medial class,” as he described it in a 1966 parley with Life magazine. “It is in middles that first and last terms contend, where dubiousness restlessly rules.”

Mr. Updike was still in his 20s whereas his second novel, “Rabbit Run,” brought him national observation in 1960. Several reviewers immediately saw the book’s main character as an icon of his generation.

Angstrom was a small-town Pennsylvania boy who grew into a seminary basketball star. He married young, quickly found adult living beings disappointing, left his wife and young son and set opposite alone.

Three more novels about Angstrom followed: “Rabbit Redux” in 1971, “Rabbit Is Rich” in 1981 and “Rabbit at Rest” in 1990. The last two in the series each won a Pulitzer. Many critics found “a great divide betwixt Updike’s exquisite command of prose and … the apparent no-good loose nothing he expended it on,” wrote critic Eliot Fremont-Smith about Rabbit in a 1981 article on the side of the Village Voice.

Updike said Rabbit was a typical man, weighed down by the pressures and disappointments of adulthood that few men spoke of in his generation.

“I knew I had things to say about it, things I thought, that nobody else was saying,” Updike told Time magazine in 2006. As Rabbit clouded through the collapse of established sexual mores, the go of the technological age and the beginnings of globalization, he became a “purposely figurative” American male, Updike explained in “Self-Consciousness,” his 1989 memoir. He referred to Rabbit as his alter self.