John Updike, the chronicler of American suburban adultery, died of lung cancer last night in a hospice near his home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. He was 76.

The novelist Philip Roth was among the first to pay tribute to “our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable.”

Nicholas Latimer, a spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf, said: “He was one of our greatest writers and he will be sorely missed.”

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said that no writer had been more important to the soul of the magazine. “Even though he was obviously among the very best writers in the world . . . he still loved writing for this weekly magazine. I never stopped thinking what he would think of what we were doing. We adored him. He was, for so long, the spirit of The New Yorker and it is very hard to imagine things without him.”

Updike’s work, which dealt with his generation’s confusion over feminism, civil rights and Vietnam, rarely failed to provoke strong reactions. Throughout his five-decade career he was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the Establishment. He was even attacked by his rival, Norman Mailer, as being the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing. Regardless, Updike won virtually every main literary prize, including two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards. A Nobel, however, eluded him.

Updike was a literary writer whose books nevertheless often appeared on bestseller lists. He produced novels, short stories, poems, criticisms, a memoir and even a famous essay about the baseball player Ted Williams. He was such a beloved part of American popular culture that he appeared as an animated version of himself in an episode of The Simpsons (he played the ghostwriter of a book by Krusty the Klown).

The author continued working to the very end of his life. His most recent novel, The Widows of Eastwick, was published last year and a new collection of stories, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, is due out this year.

Martin Amis described a section of Updike’s memoir, Self-Consciousness, as being “to my knowledge the best thing yet written on what it is like to get old: age, and the only end of age”.

Updike’s work did not win universal acclaim. In November the editors of Literary Reviewmagazine poked fun at the writer by giving him a Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award. The prize celebrates “crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature”.

Updike met his first wife, Mary Entwisted Pennington, while on a full scholarship at Harvard, where he edited the Harvard Lampoon. They married in 1953 and divorced in 1975.

The author was married again two years later, this time to Martha Bernhard.

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