Philip
Roth
Philip Roth, in full Philip Milton Roth
(b. March 19, 1933, Newark, N.J., U.S.),
American novelist and short-story writer
whose works are characterized by an
acute ear for dialogue, a concern with
Jewish middle-class life, and the
painful entanglements of sexual and
familial love. In Roth’s later years his
works were informed by an increasingly
naked preoccupation with mortality and
with the failure of the aging body and
mind.
Roth received an M.A. from the
University of Chicago and taught there
and elsewhere. He first achieved fame
with Goodbye Columbus (1959; film 1969),
whose title story candidly depicts the
boorish materialism of a Jewish
middle-class suburban family. Roth’s
first novel, Letting Go (1962), was
followed in 1967 by When She Was Good,
but he did not recapture the success of
his first book until Portnoy’s Complaint
(1969; film 1972), an audacious
satirical portrait of a contemporary
Jewish male at odds with his domineering
mother and obsessed with sexual
experience. Several minor works,
including The Breast (1972), My Life As
a Man (1974), and The Professor of
Desire (1977), were followed by one of
Roth’s most important novels, The Ghost
Writer (1979), which introduced an
aspiring young writer named Nathan
Zuckerman. Roth’s two subsequent novels,
Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy
Lesson (1983), trace his
writer-protagonist’s subsequent life and
career and constitute Roth’s first
Zuckerman trilogy. These three novels
were republished together with the
novella The Prague Orgy under the title
Zuckerman Bound (1985). A fourth
Zuckerman novel, The Counterlife,
appeared in 1993.
Roth was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for
American Pastoral (1997), a novel about
a middle-class couple whose daughter
becomes a terrorist. It is the first
novel of a second Zuckerman trilogy,
completed by I Married a Communist
(1998) and The Human Stain (2000; film
2003). In The Dying Animal (2001; filmed
as Elegy, 2008), an aging literary
professor reflects on a life of
emotional isolation. The Plot Against
America (2004) tells a counterhistorical
story of fascism in the United States
during World War II. With Everyman
(2006), a novel that explores illness
and death, Roth became the first
three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner
Award for Fiction, which he had won
previously for Operation Shylock (1993)
and The Human Stain. Exit Ghost (2007)
revisits Zuckerman, who has been
reawoken to life’s possibilities after
more than a decade of self-imposed exile
in the Berkshire Mountains. Indignation
(2008) is narrated from the afterlife by
a man who died at age 19. The novella
The Humbling (2009) revisits Everyman’s
mortality-obsessed terrain, this time
through the lens of an aging actor who,
realizing that he has lost his talent,
finds himself unable to work.
