Washington  - Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike has died of lung cancer, aged 76, his publicist said Tuesday.

"It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer," said Nicholas Latimer, publicity director for Alfred A Knopf, Updike's publisher. "He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed."

Updike was the creator of the memorable small-town character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and novelist Henry Bech. He drew much of his inspiration from personal experience growing up near Reading in south-western Pennsylvania, but said that his main subject was "the American small-town, Protestant middle class."

Novelist Philip Roth issued a statement calling Updike "our time's greatest man of letter - as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short-story writer."

"He is and always will be ... a national treasure," Roth said. "His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable."

Born March 18, 1932, Updike lived a solitary life as an only child, spending his teenage years on a secluded farm with his parents and grandparents before winning a scholarship to study English at Harvard University. He became editor of the university's humour magazine, the Harvard Lampoon, and began his professional career as a writer for The New Yorker, a magazine for which he continued to write until shortly before his death.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said that Updike had been at the core of the magazine.

"Even though he was obviously among the very best writers in the world, ... he still loved writing for this weekly magazine," Remnick said. "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 was best known for his novels, which exposed the inner conflicts facing suburban characters and which established him as one of the great post-war American novelists. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize - first for Rabbit is Rich and later for Rabbit at Rest.

Updike served as a cultural ambassador for the United States at the height of the Cold War, calling for the release of Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He received the National Medal of Art from president George Bush in 1989 and the National Medal for the Humanities from president George W Bush in 2003.

Updike is survived by his second wife, Marsha, and four children. (dpa)