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Library of America caps its five-volume edition of John Updike’s novels with a trio of resonant late masterpieces. George Steiner, in The New Yorker, wrote of this culminating phase of the author’s career: “Updike’s genius, his place beside Hawthorne and Nabokov have never been more assured.”

In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) opens in 1910 as Clarence Wilmot, a Presbyterian minister in Paterson, New Jersey, suffers a devastating loss of vocation. What follows is a tetralogy-in-miniature chronicling the fortunes of three generations of Wilmots and tracing what Updike calls a “pallid Calvinist thread” in the great American tapestry. Growing up between two world wars, Teddy, the Reverend Wilmot’s son, puts his trust not in God but in the earthly verities of family, self-sacrifice, and public service. In the postwar twilight of Hollywood’s studio system, Teddy’s beautiful, driven, and talented daughter, Essie, changes her name and becomes herself an object of worship: Alma DeMott, legendary star of film and television. And in the early 1990s, Alma’s neglected thirtysomething son, Clark, finds community and a strange, fateful purpose among a fundamentalist cult in the thin mountain air of Colorado. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it “a big, generous book ... that forces us to reassess the American Dream and the crucial role that faith (and the longing for faith) has played in shaping the national soul.”

In Gertrude and Claudius (2000), Updike imagines the backstory to the most famous play in the English language, prompting readers to revisit and perhaps revise their judgments about Hamlet’s notorious mother and uncle. Drawing on the Scandinavian sources for Hamlet, but also inventing a new history for Claudius in his far-flung travels across medieval Europe, Updike creates a vivid and surprising origin story for the fabled rottenness in Shakespeare’s Denmark. Best of all, he bestows a rich interior life upon Gertrude, perhaps the most subtly and lovingly realized of all his female characters.

The novella “Rabbit Remembered” (2000) is a poignant curtain call for one of the greatest characters in twentieth-century literature. The setting once again is Brewer, Pennsylvania, but now the widow and children of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom are reorganizing their lives a decade after his early death. Rabbit’s ghost is insistently present, and the stories shared by his family suggest that the reckoning with those closest to us, for better and for worse, never really ends. As a special feature this volume contains six pieces by Updike commenting on these works and a lifetime of writing fiction.

Christopher Carduff, Books Editor of The Wall Street Journal, is the editor of John Updike’s posthumous collections Higher Gossip, Always Looking, and Selected Poems and of the Library of America editions of Updike and William Maxwell.