Martha Ruggles Bernhard Updike

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Martha Franc Ruggles Bernhard Updike (October 18, 1937 – October 9, 2023) was an American social worker and the wife of author John Updike. She inspired several of his fictional characters, including in A Constellation of Events, which was based on how they met.

She was born in Chicago to Frederic and Margaret Ruggles and grew up in Chicago and Fairfield, Connecticut. She studied at Cornell University, where she was in Kappa Alpha Theta and studied with Vladimir Nabokov. She earned an M.Ed. from Harvard in 1964 and an M.S.W. from Simmons College in 1988.

In 1959 she married Alexander Bernhard. They had three sons, John, Jason, and Frederic, and lived in Oregon briefly before moving to the Boston area. In 1970 they bought John Updike’s house in Ipswich. By 1975 Martha had begun a relationship with John Updike, and they married in 1977. Bernhard later married Joyce Harrington.

Martha and John Updike lived in Massachusetts, including Georgetown and Beverly Farms. Updike often drew on family life in his writing, though legal concerns limited him from writing about his stepsons. He did dedicate pieces to Martha and used her Nabokov background in his work. After John Updike’s death in 2009, Martha helped manage his copyrights with his children. She spent her later years in Wenham and then in assisted living, and died in New York City at age 85 after years of dementia.