Brewer, Pennsylvania

Brewer, Pennsylvania is a fictional city that serves as the major setting for American writer John Updike's "Rabbit" cycle of novels (comprising "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit Is Rich", "Rabbit at Rest", and "Rabbit Remembered", two of which won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike).

Brewer is described as being the "fifth largest city in Pennsylvania" and seems to have many characteristics in common with the real-life city of Reading, Pennsylvania, but is in fact a composite of many places. Brewer is large enough to have a daily newspaper, the "Brewer Vat", printed by the company where Rabbit works as a linotypist in "Rabbit Redux", and a fairly well-defined social and class structure. It also has a cinema multiplex, which Updike uses as a device to define the era in which each novel is set by frequently listing which films are playing there. Rabbit eventually comes to head the city's Toyota car dealership, inherited by his wife from her father.

Updike, a Pennsylvania native, has set much of his fiction in the state, largely in Brewer and in the much-smaller rural town of Olinger.