Profile of Philip Roth on Famous Like Me

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is a Jewish-American novelist who is best known for his sexually-explicit comedic novel Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and for his late-'90s trilogy comprising the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). Most of his novels contain Jewish characters and address issues of importance to American Jews such as assimilation, Zionism, and anti-Semitism.

Life and career

Roth grew up in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey as the oldest child of first generation American parents, Jews of Galician descent. After graduating from high school at the age of 16, Roth went on to attend Bucknell University, earning a degree in English. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, receiving a M.A. in English literature and then working briefly as an instructor in the university's writing program.

It was during his Chicago stay that Roth met the novelist Saul Bellow, who briefly became his mentor, and Margaret Martinson, who eventually became his first wife. Though the two would separate in 1963, and Martinson would die in a car crash in 1968, Roth's dysfunctional marriage to her left an important mark on his literary output. Specifically, Martinson is the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth's novels, including Mary Jane Reed (aka "the Monkey") in Portnoy's Complaint.

Between the end of his studies and the publication of his first book in 1959, Roth served two years in the army and then wrote short fiction and criticism for various magazines, including movie reviews for The New Republic. His first book, Goodbye Columbus, a novella and five short stories, won the prestigious National Book Award in 1960, and afterward he published two long, bleak novels, Letting Go and When She Was Good; it was not until the publication of his third novel, Portnoy's Complaint, in 1969 that Roth enjoyed widespread commercial and critical success.

During the 1970s Roth experimented in various modes, from the political satire Our Gang to the Kafkaesque fantasy The Breast. By the end of the decade, though, Roth had created his Nathan Zuckerman alter-ego. In a series of highly self-referential novels that have followed since, Zuckerman almost always appears as either the main character or at least as an interlocutor. The number of books published during this period as well as the prestigious awards several of them have won lead many to consider it the most productive in Roth's career.

Events in Roth's personal life during the same time, though, were more mixed. According to his pseudo-confessional novel Operation Shylock, Roth suffered a nervous breakdown in the late 1980s as a result of pain-killers prescribed to him after a difficult knee operation. On April 19, 1990, he married long-time companion and English actress Claire Bloom. In 1994 they separated, and in 1996 Bloom published an embarrassing memoir detailing their relationship called Leaving a Doll's House. It is rumoured Roth was infuriated by his unflattering depiction therein, and that to exact revenge he caricatured Bloom as the poisonous Eve Frame character in I Married a Communist.

In 1995's comic masterpiece Sabbath's Theater, Roth presented his most lecherous protagonist yet in Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced aging former puppeteer. In complete contrast, the first volume of Roth's late trilogy, 1997's American Pastoral, focuses on the life of the virtuous Newark athletics star Swede Levov and the tragedy that befalls him when his daughter becomes a terrorist.

Philip Roth is unarguably the most decorated writer of his era: two of his works of fiction have won the National Book Award; two others were finalists. Two have won National Book Critics Circle awards; again, another two were finalists. He has also won two PEN/Faulkner Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - for his 1997 novel American Pastoral. In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Most remarkably, four of his last six novels have either won or been named finalists for one or more of America's four most prestigious literary awards, a phenomenal achievement for a writer now entering his seventh decade. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy.

In early 2004, the Philip Roth Society announced publication of the Philip Roth Studies journal. The inaugural issue was released in fall 2004. His latest novel, The Plot Against America, was released in the summer of 2004 and won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005.

Philip Roth currently lives in the Connecticut countryside.

Bibliography

Zuckerman novels

• The Ghost Writer (1979)
• Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
• The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
• The Prague Orgy (1985)

(The above four books are collected as Zuckerman Bound)

• The Counterlife (1986)
• American Pastoral (1997)
• I Married a Communist (1998)
• The Human Stain (2000)

Roth books

• The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
• Deception: A Novel (1990)
• Patrimony: A Memoir (1991)
• Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)
• The Plot Against America (2004)

Kepesh novels

• The Breast (1972)
• The Professor of Desire (1977)
• The Dying Animal (2001)

Other novels

• Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
• Letting Go (1962)
• When She Was Good (1967)
• Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
• Our Gang (1971)
• The Great American Novel (1973)
• My Life As a Man (1974)
• Sabbath's Theater (1995)

Collections

• Reading Myself and Others (1976)
• A Philip Roth Reader (1980)
• Shop Talk (2001)

Awards

• 1960 National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus
• 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife
• 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony
• 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock
• 1995 National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater
• 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for American Pastoral
• 1998 Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union for I Married A Communist
• 1998 National Medal of the Arts at the White House
• 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for The Human Stain
• 2001 Gold Medal In Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 2002 National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
• 2005 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for The Plot Against America

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