Washington — The novelist and essayist John Updike will deliver the 2008 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced today, the craggy writer’s 76th birthday.

Mr. Updike has written more than 50 books, including the iconic Rabbit novels, which chronicle the life (and death) of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom. The Rabbit novels won Mr. Updike the Pulitzer Prize — twice. He will publish a new novel, The Widows of Eastwick, this fall. He is also widely admired for his short stories, which earned him the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004 and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2006.

In the 37th Jefferson Lecture, which he will deliver here on May 22, Mr. Updike will take up the question “What is American about American art?” The theme is a nod to “Picturing America,” the NEH’s new effort to bring American art to schools and libraries.

Mr. Updike’s “discerning eye has made him an acute observer of American culture and art,” said Bruce Cole, the endowment’s chairman, in announcing the award. “His fiction, prose, essays, and poetry over the years have provided invaluable insights into the human condition and into the humanities.”

The writer has a longstanding personal as well as critical interest in the visual arts. As a young man, he trained for a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. His works of art history and criticism include Just Looking: Essays on Art and Still Looking: Essays on American Art.

The Jefferson Lecture is touted as “the most prestigious honor the federal government bestow for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.” No stranger to humanities awards, Mr. Updike has also been the recipient of the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. —Jennifer Howard