John Updike received numerous iterary honours over his more than 50-year career, including two Pulitzer prizes. (Martha Updike/Alfred A. Knopf/Associated Press)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike, who through his prolific career explored post-war suburban American life, has died after a battle with lung cancer. He was 76.

The writer died Tuesday morning at a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Mass., according to a statement released in the afternoon by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

Although best known for novels like his famed Rabbit series — two of which won the Pulitzer Prize — Updike's oeuvre over his more than five-decade career spanned many types of writing, including short stories, poems, children's books, essays, memoirs and literary criticism.

The bestselling author was considered among the upper echelon of contemporary U.S. authors, especially for his chronicles of modern America that explored sex, religion, marital discord and everyday society as well as capturing a generation's response to watershed events like the Vietnam war and the civil rights and women's movements.

Born in 1932 and raised in Shillington, Pa., Updike suffered from health ailments such as asthma and psoriasis from childhood, during which he developed a love for reading.

Eventually enrolling in Harvard University, he became editor of the Harvard Lampoon and graduated with an English degree. Although he travelled to England to study graphic art, he returned to the U.S., where he served as a book reviewer and writer for The New Yorker.

Updike is best known for his Rabbit series of novels, which follow the life of former high school basketball star Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom. The series, which began in 1960 with Rabbit, Run, continued with the novels Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit At Rest and the novella Rabbit Remembered, which concluded the series in 2001.

Other notable titles include Couples, In the Beauty of Lilies, Too Far to Go, The Witches of Eastwick, The Coup, Roger's Version, The Centaur and his Henry Bech series. His latest book, The Widows of Eastwick, was released in 2008.

Aside from the pair of Pulitzers, Updike's literary honours ranged from National Book Awards to the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction to the Rea Award for the Short Story.

Amid all the accolades, however, Updike was also the recipient of Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction lifetime achievement award, which the British magazine announced just this past November.

Updike is survived by his second wife, Martha, four children and grandchildren. Funeral arrangements have not been announced.

With files from the Associated Press