Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19, 1933,[6] and grew up at 81 Summit Avenue in the Weequahic neighborhood.[6] He was the second child of Bess (née Finkel) and Herman Roth, an insurance broker.[7] Roth's family was Jewish, and his parents were second-generation Americans. Roth's father's parents came from Kozlov near Lviv (then Lemberg) in Austrian Galicia; his mother's ancestors were from the region of Kyiv in Ukraine. He graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in or around 1950.[8] In 1969 Arnold H. Lubasch wrote in The New York Times, "It has provided the focus for the fiction of Philip Roth, the novelist who evokes his era at Weequahic High School in the highly acclaimed Portnoy's Complaint. Besides identifying Weequahic High School by name, the novel specifies such sites as the Empire Burlesque, the Weequahic Diner, the Newark Museum and Irvington Park, all local landmarks that helped shape the youth of the real Roth and the fictional Portnoy, both graduates of Weequahic class of '50." The 1950 Weequahic Yearbook calls Roth a "boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense." He was known as a comedian during his time at school.[9]

Roth's work first appeared in print in the Chicago Review while he was studying, and later teaching, at the University of Chicago.[13][14][15] His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, contains the novella Goodbye, Columbus and four short stories. It won the National Book Award in 1960. He published his first full-length novel, Letting Go, in 1962. In 1967 he published When She Was Good, set in the WASP Midwest in the 1940s. It is based in part on the life of Margaret Martinson Williams, whom Roth married in 1959.[12] The publication in 1969 of his fourth and most controversial novel, Portnoy's Complaint, gave Roth widespread commercial and critical success, causing his profile to rise significantly.[4][16] During the 1970s Roth experimented in various modes, from the political satire Our Gang (1971) to the Kafkaesque The Breast (1972). By the end of the decade Roth had created his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. In a series of highly self-referential novels and novellas that followed between 1979 and 1986, Zuckerman appeared as either the main character or an interlocutor.

Sabbath's Theater (1995) may have Roth's most lecherous protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced former puppeteer; it won his second National Book Award.[17] In complete contrast, American Pastoral (1997), the first volume of his so-called second Zuckerman trilogy, focuses on the life of virtuous Newark star athlete Swede Levov, and the tragedy that befalls him when Levov's teenage daughter becomes a domestic terrorist during the late 1960s; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[18] I Married a Communist (1998) focuses on the McCarthy era. The Human Stain examines identity politics in 1990s America. The Dying Animal (2001) is a short novel about eros and death that revisits literary professor David Kepesh, protagonist of two 1970s works, The Breast and The Professor of Desire (1977). In The Plot Against America (2004), Roth imagines an alternative American history in which Charles Lindbergh, aviator hero and isolationist, is elected U.S. President in 1940, and the U.S. negotiates an understanding with Hitler's Nazi Germany and embarks on its own program of anti-Semitism.

Roth's novel Everyman, a meditation on illness, aging, desire, and death, was published in May 2006. It was Roth's third book to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, making him the only person so honored. Exit Ghost, which again features Nathan Zuckerman, was released in October 2007. It was the last Zuckerman novel.[19] Indignation, Roth's 29th book, was published on September 16, 2008. Set in 1951, during the Korean War, it follows Marcus Messner's departure from Newark to Ohio's Winesburg College, where he begins his sophomore year. In 2009, Roth's 30th book, The Humbling, was published. It tells the story of the last performances of Simon Axler, a celebrated stage actor. Roth's 31st book, Nemesis, was published on October 5, 2010. According to the book's notes, Nemesis is the last in a series of four "short novels," after Everyman, Indignation and The Humbling. In October 2009, during an interview with Tina Brown of The Daily Beast to promote The Humbling, Roth considered the future of literature and its place in society, stating his belief that within 25 years the reading of novels will be regarded as a "cultic" activity:[20]

I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it's going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range. ... To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by—it's hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities[.]

When asked about the prospects for printed versus digital books, Roth was equally downbeat:[21]

The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen, and it can't compete with the computer screen. ... Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn't measure up.

This was not the first time Roth had expressed pessimism about the future of the novel and its significance in recent years. Talking to The Observer's Robert McCrum in 2001, he said, "I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here."[20] In an October 2012 interview with the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, Roth announced that he would be retiring from writing[22] and confirmed subsequently in Le Monde that he would no longer publish fiction.[23] In a May 2014 interview with Alan Yentob for the BBC, Roth said, "this is my last appearance on television, my absolutely last appearance on any stage anywhere."[24]

Much of Roth's fiction revolves around semi-autobiographical themes, while self-consciously and playfully addressing the perils of establishing connections between Roth and his fictional lives and voices.[25] Examples of this close relationship between the author's life and his characters' include narrators and protagonists such as David Kepesh and Nathan Zuckerman as well as the character "Philip Roth", who appears in The Plot Against America and of whom there are two in Operation Shylock. Critic Jacques Berlinerblau noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education that these fictional voices create a complex and tricky experience for readers, deceiving them into believing they "know" Roth.[25] In Roth's fiction the question of authorship is intertwined with the theme of the idealistic, secular Jewish son who attempts to distance himself from Jewish customs and traditions, and from what he perceives as the sometimes suffocating influence of parents, rabbis, and other community leaders.[26] Roth's fiction has been described by critics as pervaded by "a kind of alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it".[26]

Roth's first work, Goodbye, Columbus, was an irreverently humorous depiction of the life of middle-class Jewish Americans, and met controversy among reviewers, who were highly polarized in their judgments;[4] one criticized it as infused with a sense of self-loathing. In response, Roth, in his 1963 essay "Writing About Jews" (collected in Reading Myself and Others), maintained that he wanted to explore the conflict between the call to Jewish solidarity and his desire to be free to question the values and morals of middle-class Jewish Americans uncertain of their identities in an era of cultural assimilation and upward social mobility:[27]

The cry 'Watch out for the goyim!' at times seems more the expression of an unconscious wish than of a warning: Oh that they were out there, so that we could be together here! A rumor of persecution, a taste of exile, might even bring with it the old world of feelings and habits—something to replace the new world of social accessibility and moral indifference, the world which tempts all our promiscuous instincts, and where one cannot always figure out what a Jew is that a Christian is not.

In Roth's fiction the exploration of "promiscuous instincts" within the context of Jewish lives, mainly from a male viewpoint, plays an important role. In the words of critic Hermione Lee:[28]

Philip Roth's fiction strains to shed the burden of Jewish traditions and proscriptions. ... The liberated Jewish consciousness, let loose into the disintegration of the American Dream, finds itself deracinated and homeless. American society and politics, by the late sixties, are a grotesque travesty of what Jewish immigrants had traveled towards: liberty, peace, security, a decent liberal democracy.

While Roth's fiction has strong autobiographical influences, it also incorporates social commentary and political satire, most obviously in Our Gang and Operation Shylock. From the 1990s on Roth's fiction often combined autobiographical elements with retrospective dramatizations of postwar American life. Roth described American Pastoral and the two following novels as a loosely connected "American trilogy". Each of these novels treats aspects of the postwar era against the backdrop of the nostalgically remembered Jewish-American childhood of Nathan Zuckerman, in which the experience of life on the American home front during the Second World War features prominently.

In much of Roth's fiction, the 1940s, comprising Roth's and Zuckerman's childhood, mark a high point of American idealism and social cohesion. A more satirical treatment of the patriotism and idealism of the war years is evident in Roth's comic novels, such as Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath's Theater. In The Plot Against America, the alternate history of the war years dramatizes the prevalence of anti-Semitism and racism in America at the time, despite the promotion of increasingly influential anti-racist ideals during the war. In his fiction Roth portrayed the 1940s, and the New Deal era of the 1930s that preceded it, as a heroic phase in American history. A sense of frustration with social and political developments in the United States since the 1940s is palpable in the American trilogy and Exit Ghost, but had already been present in Roth's earlier works that contained political and social satire, such as Our Gang and The Great American Novel. Writing about the latter, Hermione Lee points to the sense of disillusionment with "the American Dream" in Roth's fiction: "The mythic words on which Roth's generation was brought up—winning, patriotism, gamesmanship—are desanctified; greed, fear, racism, and political ambition are disclosed as the motive forces behind the 'all-American ideals'."[28]

Although Roth's writings often explored the Jewish experience in America, Roth rejected being labeled a Jewish-American writer. "It's not a question that interests me. I know exactly what it means to be Jewish and it's really not interesting," he told the Guardian newspaper in 2005. "I'm an American."[29]

While at Chicago in 1956, Roth met Margaret Martinson, who became his first wife in 1959. Their separation in 1963, and Martinson's subsequent death in a car crash in 1968, left a lasting mark on Roth's literary output. Martinson was the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth's novels, including Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good and Maureen Tarnopol in My Life as a Man.[30]

Roth was an atheist who once said, "When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place."[31][32] He also said during an interview with The Guardian: "I'm exactly the opposite of religious, I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie," and "It's not a neurotic thing, but the miserable record of religion—I don't even want to talk about it. It's not interesting to talk about the sheep referred to as believers. When I write, I'm alone. It's filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety—and I never needed religion to save me."[33]

In 1990 Roth married his longtime companion, English actress Claire Bloom, with whom he had been living since 1976. When Bloom asked him to marry her, "cruelly, he agreed, on condition that she signed a pre-nuptial agreement that would give her very little in the event of a divorce—which he duly demanded two years later." He also stipulated that Bloom's daughter Anna—from her first marriage, to Rod Steiger—not live with them.[34] In 1994 they divorced, and in 1996 Bloom published a memoir, Leaving a Doll's House, that depicted Roth as a misogynist and control freak. Some critics have detected parallels between Bloom and the character Eve Frame in Roth's I Married a Communist (1998).[12]

The novel Operation Shylock (1993) and other works draw on a post-operative breakdown[35][36][37] and Roth's experience of the temporary side effects of the sedative Halcion (triazolam), prescribed post-operatively in the 1980s.[38][39]

Roth died at a Manhattan hospital of heart failure on May 22, 2018, at the age of 85.[40][12][41]

Roth was buried at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where in 1999 he taught a class. He had originally planned to be buried next to his parents at the Gomel Chesed Cemetery in Newark, but changed his mind about fifteen years before his death, in order to be buried close to his friend, the novelist Norman Manea.[42] Roth expressly banned any religious rituals from his funeral service, though it was noted that only one day after his burial a pebble had been placed on top of his tombstone in accordance with Jewish tradition.[43]

Among the admirers of Roth's work is famed New Jersey singer Bruce Springsteen. Roth read the musician's autobiography Born to Run and Springsteen read Roth's American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, and The Human Stain. Springsteen said of Roth's work: "I'll tell you, those three recent books by Philip Roth just knocked me on my ass.... To be in his sixties making work that is so strong, so full of revelations about love and emotional pain, that's the way to live your artistic life. Sustain, sustain, sustain."[44]

Roth left his book collection and more than $2 million to the Newark Public Library.[45][46]

In April 2021, Blake Bailey's authorized biography of Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography, was published by W. W. Norton & Company. Publication was halted two weeks after release, due to sexual assault allegations against Bailey.[47][48][49][50] Three weeks later, in May 2021, Skyhorse Publishing announced that it would release a paperback, ebook, and audiobook versions of the biography.[51]

Roth had asked his executors "to destroy many of his personal papers after the publication of the semi-authorized biography on which Blake Bailey had recently begun work.... Roth wanted to ensure that Bailey, who was producing exactly the type of biography he wanted, would be the only person outside a small circle of intimates permitted to access personal, sensitive manuscripts, including the unpublished Notes for My Biographer (a 295-page rebuttal to his ex-wife's memoir) and Notes on a Slander-Monger (another rebuttal, this time to a biographical effort from Bailey's predecessor). 'I don't want my personal papers dragged all over the place,' Roth said.... The fate of Roth's personal papers took on new urgency in the wake of Norton's decision [to halt distribution of the biography. In May 2021], the Philip Roth Society published an open letter[52] imploring Roth's executors 'to preserve these documents and make them readily available to researchers.'"[53][54][55]

After Roth's passing, Harold Bloom told the Library of America that "Philip Roth’s departure is a dark day for me and for many others. His two greatest novels, American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater, have a controlled frenzy, a high imaginative ferocity, and a deep perception of America in the days of its decline. The Zuckerman tetralogy remains fully alive and relevant, and I should mention too the extraordinary invention of Operation Shylock, the astonishing achievement of The Counterlife, and the pungency of The Plot Against America. His My Life as a Man still haunts me. In one sense Philip Roth is the culmination of the unsolved riddle of Jewish literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The complex influences of Kafka and Freud and the malaise of American Jewish life produced in Philip a new kind of synthesis. Pynchon aside, he must be estimated as the major American novelist since Faulkner."[56]

Joyce Carol Oates told The Guardian: "Philip Roth was a slightly older contemporary of mine. We had come of age in more or less the same repressive 50s era in America—formalist, ironic, 'Jamesian', a time of literary indirection and understatement, above all impersonality—as the high priest TS Eliot had preached: 'Poetry is an escape from personality.' Boldly, brilliantly, at times furiously, and with an unsparing sense of the ridiculous, Philip repudiated all that. He did revere Kafka—but Lenny Bruce as well. (In fact, the essential Roth is just that anomaly: Kafka riotously interpreted by Lenny Bruce.) But there was much more to Philip than furious rebellion. For at heart he was a true moralist, fired to root out hypocrisy and mendacity in public life as well as private. Few saw The Plot Against America as actual prophecy, but here we are. He will abide."[57]

Two of Roth's works won the National Book Award for Fiction; four others were finalists. Two won National Book Critics Circle awards; another five were finalists. He also won three PEN/Faulkner Awards (for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral.[18] In 2001 The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, as well as France's Prix Médicis Étranger. In 2002 Roth was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.[58] In 2003 literary critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy.[59] The Plot Against America (2004) won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005 as well as the Society of American Historians' James Fenimore Cooper Prize. Roth was also awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, an award he received twice.[60] He was honored in his hometown in October 2005 when then-mayor Sharpe James presided over the unveiling of a street sign in Roth's name on the corner of Summit and Keer Avenues where Roth lived for much of his childhood, a setting prominent in The Plot Against America. A plaque on the house where the Roths lived was also unveiled. In May 2006 he received the PEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007 he was awarded the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, making him the award's only three-time winner. In April 2007 he was chosen as the recipient of the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.[61]

The May 21, 2006 issue of The New York Times Book Review announced the results of a letter that was sent to what the publication described as "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.'" Six of Roth's novels were among the 22 selected: American Pastoral, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America.[62] The accompanying essay, written by critic A.O. Scott, stated, "If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction of the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won."[63] In 2009 he was awarded the Welt-Literaturpreis of the German newspaper Die Welt.[64]

Roth was awarded the 42nd Edward MacDowell Medal by the MacDowell Colony in 2001.[65]

Roth was awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal by U.S. President Barack Obama in the East Room of the White House on March 2, 2011.[66][67]

In May 2011, Roth was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction on the world stage, the fourth winner of the biennial prize.[68] One of the judges, Carmen Callil, a publisher of the feminist Virago house, withdrew in protest, referring to Roth's work as "Emperor's clothes". She said "he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe ... I don't rate him as a writer at all ...".[69] Observers noted that Callil had a conflict of interest, having published a book by Claire Bloom (Roth's ex-wife) that criticized Roth and lambasted their marriage.[69] In response, one of the two other Booker judges, Rick Gekoski, remarked:

In 1959 he writes Goodbye, Columbus and it's a masterpiece, magnificent. Fifty-one years later he's 78 years old and he writes Nemesis and it is so wonderful, such a terrific novel ... Tell me one other writer who 50 years apart writes masterpieces ... If you look at the trajectory of the average novel writer, there is a learning period, then a period of high achievement, then the talent runs out and in middle age they start slowly to decline. People say why aren't Martin [Amis] and Julian [Barnes] getting on the Booker prize shortlist, but that's what happens in middle age. Philip Roth, though, gets better and better in middle age. In the 1990s he was almost incapable of not writing a masterpiece—The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, I Married a Communist. He was 65–70 years old, what the hell's he doing writing that well?[70]

In 2012 Roth received the Prince of Asturias Award for literature.[71] On March 19, 2013, his 80th birthday was celebrated in public ceremonies at the Newark Museum.[72]

One prize that eluded Roth was the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he was a favorite of bookmakers and critics for decades.[73][74][75] Ron Charles of The Washington Post wrote that "thundering obituaries" around the world noted that "he won every other honor a writer could win", sometimes even two or three times, except the Nobel Prize.[76]

Roth worked hard to obtain his many awards, spending large amounts of time "networking, scratching people’s backs, placing his people in positions, voting for them" in order to increase his chances of receiving awards.[77]

• Balint, Benjamin, "Philip Roth's Counterlives," Books & Ideas, May 5, 2014.
• Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views of Philip Roth, Chelsea House, New York, 2003.
• Bloom, Harold and Welsch, Gabe, eds., Modern Critical Interpretations of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. Broomall, Penn.: Chelsea House, 2003.
• Cooper, Alan, Philip Roth and the Jews (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture). Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.
• Dean, Andrew. Metafiction and the Postwar Novel: Foes, Ghosts, and Faces in the Water, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021.
• Finkielkraut, Alain, "La plaisanterie" [on The Human Stain], in Un coeur intelligent. Paris: Stock/Flammarion, 2009.
• Finkielkraut, Alain, "La complainte du désamour" (on The Professor of Desire), in Et si l'amour durait. Paris: Stock, 2011.
• Hayes, Patrick. Philip Roth: Fiction and Power, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014.
• Kinzel, Till, Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens. Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie (American Studies Monograph Series). Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag Winter, 2006.
• Miceli, Barbara, 'Escape from the Corpus: The Pain of Writing and Illness in Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson' in Bootheina Majoul and Hanen Baroumi, The Poetics and Hermeuetics of Pain and Pleasure, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022: 55-62.
• Milowitz, Steven, Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer. New York: Routledge, 2000.
• Morley, Catherine, The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2008.
• Parrish, Timothy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Pierpont, Claudia Roth Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
• Podhoretz, Norman, "The Adventures of Philip Roth," Commentary (October 1998), reprinted as "Philip Roth, Then and Now" in The Norman Podhoretz Reader. New York: Free Press, 2004.
• Posnock, Ross, Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
• Royal, Derek Parker, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2005.
• Safer, Elaine B., Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture). Albany: SUNY Press, 2006.
• Schmitt, Sebastian, Fifties Nostalgia in Selected Novels of Philip Roth (MOSAIC: Studien und Texte zur amerikanischen Kultur und Geschichte, Vol. 60). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017.
• Searles, George J., ed., Conversations With Philip Roth. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992.
• Searles, George J., The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
• Shostak, Debra B., Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
• Simic, Charles, "The Nicest Boy in the World," The New York Review of Books 55, no. 15 (October 9, 2008): 4–7.[1]
• Swirski, Peter, "It Can't Happen Here, or Politics, Emotions, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America." American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York, Routledge, 2011.
• Taylor, Benjamin. Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth. New York: Penguin Random House, 2020.
• Wolcott, James, "Sisyphus at the Selectric" (review of Blake Bailey, Philip Roth: The Biography, Cape, April 2021, 898 pp., ISBN 978 0 224 09817 5; Ira Nadel, Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Oxford, May 2021, 546 pp., ISBN 978 0 19 984610 8; and Benjamin Taylor, Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, Penguin, May 2020, 192 pp., ISBN 978 0 525 50524 2), London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 10 (May 20, 2021), pp. 3, 5–10. Wolcott: "He's a great writer but is he a great writer? And what does 'great writer' mean now anyhow?" (p. 10.)
• Wöltje, Wiebke-Maria, My finger on the pulse of the nation: Intellektuelle Protagonisten im Romanwerk Philip Roths (Mosaic, 26). Trier: WVT, 2006.

• Philip Roth interview in USA: Writers (NET) in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Televised July 10, 1966
• Literary Encyclopedia biography
• The Philip Roth Society
• Philip Roth looks back on a legendary career, and forward to his final act
• American Master's Philip Roth: Unmasked.
• Works by Philip Roth at Open Library
• Library resources in your library and in other libraries by Philip Roth
• Web of Stories online video archive: Roth talks about his life and work in great depth and detail. Recorded in NYC, March 2011
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Philip Roth at the Internet Broadway Database
• Philip Roth at IMDb 
• Philip Roth at Find a Grave
• Guide to the Jerome Perzigian Collection of Philip Roth 1958-1987 at the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center