Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22,
2018)[1] was an American novelist and short-story Philip Roth
writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of
Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely
autobiographical character, for philosophically and
formally blurring the distinction between reality and
fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its
provocative explorations of American identity.[2] He
first gained attention with the 1959 short story
collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S.
National Book Award for Fiction.[3][4] Ten years later,
he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint.
Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates
several of his books. A fictionalized Roth narrates
some of his others, such as the alternate history The
Plot Against America.
Roth was one of the most honored American writers of
his generation.[5] He received the National Book
Roth in 1973
Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the
Born Philip Milton Roth
PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The
March 19, 1933
Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book
Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for
Died May 22, 2018 (aged 85)
American Pastoral. In 2001, Roth received the
New York City, U.S.
inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague. In 2005, the
Library of America began publishing his complete Resting place Bard College Cemetery
works, making him the second author so anthologized Occupation Novelist
while still living, after Eudora Welty.[6] Harold Bloom Education Bucknell University (BA)
named him one of the four greatest American novelists University of Chicago (MA)
of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas
Period 1959–2010
Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. James Wood wrote: "More
Genre Literary fiction
than any other post-war American writer, Roth wrote
the self—the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, Spouses Margaret Martinson Williams
(m. 1959; div. 1963)
fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced but above all
constituted by and in writing. Maybe you have to go Claire Bloom
(m. 1990; div. 1995)
back to the very different Henry James to find an
American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so
restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language... He
would not cease from exploration; he could not cease, and the varieties of fiction existed for him to
explore the varieties of experience."[7]
Early life and academic pursuits
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19, 1933,[8] and grew up at 81 Summit Avenue in
the Weequahic neighborhood.[8] He was the second child of Bess (née Finkel) and Herman Roth, an
insurance broker.[9] Roth's family was Jewish, and his parents were second-generation Americans. His
paternal grandparents came from Kozlov near Lviv (then Lemberg) in Austrian Galicia, and his mother's
ancestors were from the region of Kyiv in Ukraine. He graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School
in or around 1950.[10]
In 1969, Arnold H. Lubasch wrote in The New York Times that the school "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.[11]
Academic career
Roth attended Rutgers University in Newark for a year, then transferred to Bucknell University in
Pennsylvania, where he earned a B.A. magna cum laude in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
He received a fellowship to attend the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. in English
literature[12] in 1955 and briefly worked as an instructor in the university's writing program.[13] That
same year, rather than wait to be drafted, Roth enlisted in the army, but suffered a back injury during
basic training and was given a medical discharge. He returned to Chicago in 1956 to study for a PhD in
literature, but dropped out after one term.[14] Roth was a longtime faculty member at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature until retiring from teaching in 1991.[13]
Writing career
Roth's work first appeared in print in the Chicago Review while he was studying, and later teaching, at
the University of Chicago.[15][16][17] 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.[14]
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][18] 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.[19] In complete contrast, American Pastoral
(1997), the first volume of his so-called American Trilogy, focuses on the life of virtuous Newark star
athlete Swede Levov, and the tragedy that befalls him when his teenage daughter becomes a domestic
terrorist during the late 1960s. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[20]
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.[21] 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:[22]
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:[23]
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."[22] In an October
2012 interview with the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, Roth
announced that he would be retiring from writing[24] and
confirmed subsequently in Le Monde that he would no longer
publish fiction.[25] 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."[26]
Reflecting on his writing career, in an afterword written on the
25th anniversary of the publication of Portnoy's Complaint, Roth Roth in 2017
wrote, "I wished to dazzle in my very own way and to dazzle
myself no less than anyone else."[27] To inspire himself to write,
he recalled thinking, "All you have to do is sit down and work!"[27]
Influences and themes
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.[28] 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.[28]
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.[29] Roth's fiction
has been described by critics as pervaded by "a kind of alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by
what binds it".[29]
Roth's first work, Goodbye, Columbus, was an irreverently humorous depiction of the life of middle-class
Jewish Americans and received highly polarized reviews;[4] one reviewer found it infused with 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:[30]
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:[31]
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. American Pastoral looks at the
legacy of the 1960s, as Swede Levov's daughter becomes an antiwar terrorist. I Married a Communist
(1998), in which radio actor Ira Ringold is revealed as a communist sympathizer, is set in the McCarthy
era. The Human Stain, in which classics professor Coleman Silk's secret history is revealed, explores
identity politics in the late 1990s.
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'."[31] 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."[32]
Roth was a baseball fan, and credited the game with shaping his literary sensibility. In an essay published
in The New York Times on Opening Day, 1973, Roth wrote that "baseball, with its lore and legends, its
cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategy,
its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its
'characters,' its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate, was the literature
of my boyhood... Of course, as time passed neither the flavor and suggestiveness of Red Barber's
narration, nor specific details, vivid and revealing even as Rex Barney's pre-game hot dog, could continue
to satisfy a developing literary appetite; there is no doubt, however, that they helped sustain me until I
was old enough and literate enough to begin to respond to the great inventors of narrative detail and
masters of narrative voice and perspective, like James and Conrad and Dostoyevsky and Bellow."[33]
Baseball features in several of Roth's novels; the hero of Portnoy's Complaint dreams of playing like
Duke Snider, and Nicholas Dawidoff called The Great American Novel "one of the most eccentric
baseball novels ever written".[34] American Pastoral alludes to John R. Tunis's baseball novel The Kid
from Tomkinsville.
In a speech on his 80th birthday, Roth emphasized the importance of realistic detail in American
literature:
the passion for specificity, the hypnotic materiality of the world one is in, is all but at the
heart of the task to which every American novelist has been enjoined since Herman Melville
and his whale and Mark Twain and his river: to discover the most arresting, evocative verbal
depiction of every last American thing. Without strong representation of the thing—animate
or inanimate—without the crucial representation of what is real, there is nothing. Its
concreteness, its unabashed focus on all the particulars, a fervor for the singular and a
profound aversion to generalities is fiction's lifeblood. It is from a scrupulous fidelity to the
blizzard of specific data that is a personal life, it is from the force of its uncompromising
particularity, from its physicalness, that the realistic novel, the insatiable realistic novel with
its multitude of realities, derives its ruthless intimacy. And its mission: to portray humanity in
its particularity.[35]
Personal life
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.[36]
Roth was an atheist who once said, "When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great
place."[37][38] 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 ... 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."[39]
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 Steiger—from her marriage to
Rod Steiger—not live with them.[40] They divorced in 1994, and Bloom published a 1996 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).[14]
The novel Operation Shylock (1993) and other works draw on a post-operative breakdown,[41][42][43] as
well as Roth's experience of the temporary side effects of the sedative Halcion (triazolam), prescribed
post-operatively in the 1980s.[44][45]
Death and burial
Roth died at a Manhattan hospital of heart failure on May 22, 2018, at the age of 85.[46][14][47] 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 15 years before his death, in order to be buried close to where his
friend Norman Manea is writer in residence,[48] and near other Jews "to whom he could talk".[49] Roth
expressly banned any religious rituals from his funeral service, though it was noted that, the day after his
burial, a pebble had been placed on top of his tombstone in accordance with Jewish tradition.[50]
List of works
"Zuckerman" novels
Zuckerman Bound (1979–1985)
The Ghost Writer (1979)
Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
The Prague Orgy (1985)
The Counterlife (1986)
American Pastoral (1997)
I Married a Communist (1998)
The Human Stain (2000)
Exit Ghost (2007)
"Roth" novels and memoirs
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
Deception: A Novel (1990)
Patrimony: A True Story (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)
"Nemeses" novels
Everyman (2006)
Indignation (2008)
The Humbling (2009)
Nemesis (2010)
Fiction with other protagonists
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (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)
Awards and nominations
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. Roth won three PEN/Faulkner Awards
(for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel
American Pastoral.[20]
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. Also in 2001, the MacDowell Colony
awarded Roth the 42nd Edward MacDowell Medal.[51] In 2002, Roth was awarded the National Book
Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.[52]
In 2003, literary critic Harold Bloom named Roth one of the four major American novelists still at work,
along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.[53] The Plot Against America (2004)
won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005 and 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.[54]
In October 2005, Roth was honored in his hometown 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 unveiled. In May 2006, he received the PEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007 he received
the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, making him the award's only three-time winner. In April 2007, he
received the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.[55]
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 identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25
years'". American Pastoral tied for fifth, and The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The
Human Stain and The Plot Against America received multiple votes. In the accompanying essay, A. O.
Scott wrote: "Over the past 15 years, Roth's output has been so steady, so various and (mostly) so
excellent that his vote has been, inevitably, split. If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction of
the past 25 years, he would have won." Scott notes that "The Roth whose primary concern is the past—
the elegiac, summarizing, conservative Roth—is preferred over his more aesthetically radical, restless,
present-minded doppelgänger by a narrow but decisive margin."[56] In 2009, Roth received the German
newspaper Die Welt's Welt-Literaturpreis.[57]
President Barack Obama awarded Roth the 2010 National Humanities Medal in the East Room of the
White House on March 2, 2011.[58][59]
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.[60] 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 ...".[61]
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.[61] 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?[62]
In 2012 Roth received the Prince of Asturias Award for literature.[63] On March 19, 2013, his 80th
birthday was celebrated in public ceremonies at the Newark Museum.[64]
One prize that eluded Roth was the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he was a favorite of bookmakers
and critics for decades.[65][66][67] 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.[68]
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.[69]
Films
Eight of Roth's novels and short stories have been adapted as films: Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy's
Complaint; The Human Stain; The Dying Animal, adapted as Elegy; The Humbling; Indignation; and
American Pastoral. In addition, The Ghost Writer was adapted for television in 1984.[70] In 2014
filmmaker Alex Ross Perry made Listen Up Philip, which was influenced by Roth's work. HBO
dramatized Roth's The Plot Against America in 2020 as a six-part series starting Zoe Kazan, Winona
Ryder, John Turturro, and Morgan Spencer.
Honors
1960 National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus[3]
1960 National Jewish Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus[71]
1975 National Book Award finalist for My Life as A Man[72]
1978 NBCCA finalist for The Professor Of Desire
1980 Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Ghost Writer[20]
1980 National Book Award finalist for The Ghost Writer[72]
1980 NBCCA finalist for The Ghost Writer
1984 National Book Award finalist for The Anatomy Lesson[72]
1984 NBCCA finalist for The Anatomy Lesson
1986 National Book Critics Circle Award (NBCCA) for The Counterlife
1987 National Book Award finalist for The Counterlife[72]
1988 National Jewish Book Award for The Counterlife[71]
1991 National Book Critics Circle Award (NBCCA) for Patrimony[72]
1994 PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock
1994 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Operation Shylock[20]
1995 National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater[19]
1996 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Sabbath's Theater[20]
1997 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Sabbath's Theater
1998 Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral[20]
1998 NBCCA finalist for American Pastoral
1998 Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist[72]
1998 National Medal of Arts[72]
1999 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for American Pastoral
2000 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France) for American Pastoral
2000 International Dublin Literary Award shortlist for I Married a Communist
2000 National Jewish Book Award for The Human Stain[71]
2001 Franz Kafka Prize
2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for The Human Stain
2001 Gold Medal In Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters[72]
2001 42nd Edward MacDowell Medal from the MacDowell Colony
2001 WH Smith Literary Award for The Human Stain
2002 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for The Human Stain
2002 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book
Foundation[52]
2002 Prix Médicis Étranger (France) for The Human Stain
2005 NBCCA finalist for The Plot Against America
2005 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for The Plot Against America
2005 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction for The Plot Against America
2005 Nominee for Man Booker International Prize
2005 WH Smith Literary Award for The Plot Against America
2006 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement
2007 PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman[72]
2007 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
2008 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Everyman
2009 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Exit Ghost
2010 The Paris Review Hadada Prize
2011 National Humanities Medal for 2010
2011 Man Booker International Prize
2012 Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction
2012 Prince of Asturias Awards for literature[60]
2013 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award for lifetime achievement and
advocacy.[73][74][75]
2013 Commander of the Legion of Honor by the Republic of France.[76]
Honorary degrees
Location Date School Degree
Pennsylvania 1979 Bucknell University Doctorate
Doctor of Letters
New York 1985 Bard College
([Link].)[77]
Doctor of Humane
New York May 20, 1987 Columbia University
Letters (DHL)[78]
Doctor of Humane
New Jersey May 21, 1987 Rutgers University
Letters (DHL)[79][80]
Doctor of Letters
Rhode Island 2001 Brown University
([Link].)[81]
Doctor of Humane
Pennsylvania 2003 University of Pennsylvania
Letters (DHL)[82]
Doctor of Humane
Massachusetts June 5, 2003 Harvard University
Letters (DHL)[83]
New York May 22, 2014 Jewish Theological Seminary of America Doctorate[84]
Legacy
John Updike, considered by many Roth's chief literary rival, said in 2008, "He's scarily devoted to the
novelist's craft... [he] seems more dedicated in a way to the act of writing as a means of really reshaping
the world to your liking. But he's been very good to have around as far as goading me to become a better
writer." Roth spoke at Updike's memorial service, saying, "He is and always will be no less a national
treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne."[85] After Updike's memorial at the New
York Public Library, Roth told Charles McGrath, "I dream about John sometimes. He's standing behind
me, watching me write." Asked who was better, Roth said, "John had more talent, but I think maybe I got
more out of the talent I had." McGrath agreed with that assessment, adding that Updike might be the
better stylist, but Roth's work was more consistent and "much funnier". McGrath added that in the 1990s
Roth "underwent a kind of sea change and, borne aloft by that extraordinary second wind, produced some
of his very best work": Sabbath's Theater and the American Trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a
Communist, and The Human Stain).[86] Another admirer of Roth's work is Bruce Springsteen. Roth read
Springsteen's autobiography, Born to Run, and Springsteen praised Roth's American Trilogy: "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."[87]
Roth left his book collection and more than $2 million to the Newark Public Library.[88][89] In 2021, the
Philip Roth Personal Library opened for public viewing in the Newark Public Library.[90] In April 2021,
W. W. Norton & Company published Blake Bailey's authorized biography of Roth, Philip Roth: The
Biography. Publication was halted two weeks after release due to sexual assault allegations against
Bailey.[91][92][93][94] Three weeks later, in May 2021, Skyhorse Publishing announced that it would
release a paperback, ebook, and audiobook versions of the biography.[95] 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[96] imploring Roth's executors 'to preserve these documents and make them readily available to
researchers.'"[97][98][99]
After Roth's death, Harold Bloom told the Library of America: "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."[100]
The New York Times asked several prominent authors to name their favorite work by Roth. The responses
were varied; Jonathan Safran Foer chose Patrimony, Roth's memoir of his father's illness: "Much has
been written about Roth since he died. In keeping with the unseemliness of our profession, we all have
something to say. The responses have overflowed with a kind of blunt adoration that would be perfectly
un-Rothlike if they weren't the efforts of children agonizing over the right way to bury our father. None of
it feels right, perhaps because nothing could. Roth's words dressed his father for death, and they dressed
so many of us for life. How does one properly acknowledge that? How does one say thank you for the
thousand almost-invisible preparations? This morning, as I was getting my children dressed for school, I
felt the profound gratitude of a 'little son.'"[101]
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."[102]
References
Citations
1. McGrath, Charles (May 23, 2018). "Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust,
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4. Brauner (2005), pp. 43–47
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second half, most completely in the chapter "Girl of My Dreams," which includes this on p.
110: "Why should I have tried to make up anything better? How could I?" Her influence upon
Portnoy's Complaint is seen in The Facts as more diffuse, a kind of loosening-up for the
author: "It took time and it took blood, and not, really, until I began Portnoy's Complaint
would I be able to cut loose with anything approaching her gift for flabbergasting boldness."
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" 'Do you consider yourself a religious person?' 'No, I don't have a religious bone in my
body,' Roth said. 'You don't?' 'No.' 'So, do you feel like there's a God out there?' Braver
asked. 'I'm afraid there isn't, no,' Roth said. 'You know that telling the whole world that you
don't believe in God is going to, you know, have people say, "Oh my goodness, you know,
that's a terrible thing for him to say,"' Braver said. Roth replied, 'When the whole world
doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.' "
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extreme depression that carried me right to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution. It
was in the period of post-crack-up medication, with the clarity attending the remission of an
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[Link]). The New York Times. Retrieved April 14, 2021.
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April 14, 2021.
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Roth’s Estate Plans on Destroying Them." The New Republic, May 21, 2021 [3] ([Link]
[Link]/article/162475/philip-roth-blake-bailey-documents-biography)
98. Copies of Notes for My Biographer, Notes on a Slander-Monger, and other "typescripts and
manuscripts" were "deeded" by Benjamin Taylor, to whom Roth had given them, "to the
Manuscripts Division of Princeton's Firestone Library." Benjamin Taylor, "Even in His
Retirement, Philip Roth Wrote Thousands of Pages", Literary Hub, May 19, 2020 [4] (https://
[Link]/even-in-his-retirement-philip-roth-wrote-thousands-of-pages/). The text of this
article was included in Benjamin Taylor, Here We Are: My Friendship With Philip Roth
(Penguin Books, 2020).
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s://[Link]/2021/06/04/books/[Link])
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[Link]/news-and-views/1417-megan-abbott-jonathan-lethem-and-other-writers-pay-tribute-t
o-philip-roth). June 11, 2018.
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m/2018/05/25/books/[Link]#link-570d528e). The New York Times.
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[Link]/books/2018/may/23/philip-roth-remembered-authors-friends). The
Guardian. May 23, 2018.
Sources
Brauner, David (1969) Getting in Your Retaliation First: Narrative Strategies in Portnoy's
Complaint in Royal, Derek Parker (2005) Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American
Author ([Link] chapter 3
Greenberg, Robert (Winter 1997). "Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth" ([Link]
[Link]/web/20070309112703/[Link]
0614549). Twentieth Century Literature. 43 (4). Hofstra University: 487–506.
doi:10.2307/441747 ([Link] JSTOR 441747 ([Link]
org/stable/441747). Archived from the original ([Link] on
March 9, 2007.
Saxton, Martha (1974) Philip Roth Talks about His Own Work Literary Guild June 1974, n.2.
Also published in Philip Roth, George John Searles (1992) Conversations with Philip Roth
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Further reading and literary criticism
Balint, Benjamin, "Philip Roth's Counterlives ([Link]
[Link])," 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 (ht
tps://[Link]/books?id=z7klEAAAQBAJ), 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 ([Link]
AAQBAJ), 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 (Open Access: [Link]
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 ([Link]
the-nicest-boy-in-the-world/)," The New York Review of Books 55, no. 15 (October 9, 2008):
4–7.
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.
External links
Philip Roth interview in USA: Writers (NET) in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
Televised July 10, 1966 ([Link]
Literary Encyclopedia biography ([Link]
939)
The Philip Roth Society ([Link]
Philip Roth looks back on a legendary career, and forward to his final act ([Link]
[Link]/ae/print/2008/sep/18/long-haul/)
American Master's Philip Roth: Unmasked. ([Link]
p-roth-documentary/6056/)
Works by Philip Roth ([Link] at Open Library
Library resources in your library ([Link]
and in other libraries ([Link]
OOSE0) 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 ([Link]
Appearances ([Link] on C-SPAN
Philip Roth ([Link] at the Internet Broadway
Database
Philip Roth ([Link] at IMDb
Philip Roth ([Link] at Find a Grave
Guide to the Jerome Perzigian Collection of Philip Roth 1958-1987 ([Link]
[Link]/e/scrc/findingaids/[Link]?eadid=[Link]) at the University of
Chicago Special Collections Research Center ([Link]
Retrieved from "[Link]