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PHILIP ROTH, TOWERING NOVELIST WHO EXPLORED LUST, JEWISH LIFE AND AMERICA,
DIES AT 85
May 22, 2018
Philip Roth, the prolific, protean, and often blackly comic novelist who was a pre-eminent figure in
20th-century literature, died on Tuesday night at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 85.
The writer Judith Thurman, a close friend, said the cause was congestive heart failure. Mr. Roth had
homes in Manhattan and Connecticut.
In the course of a very long career, Mr. Roth took on many guises — mainly versions of himself —
in the exploration of what it means to be an American, a Jew, a writer, a man. He was a champion
of Eastern European novelists like Ivan Klima and Bruno Schulz, and also a passionate student of
American history and the American vernacular. And more than just about any other writer of his
time, he was tireless in his exploration of male sexuality.
His creations include Alexander Portnoy, a teenager so libidinous, he has sex with both his baseball
mitt and the family dinner, and David Kepesh, a professor who turns into an exquisitely sensitive
155-pound female breast.
Mr. Roth was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers — Saul Bellow and John
Updike were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century.
Outliving both and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Mr. Roth wrote more novels than
either of them. In 2005 he became only the third living writer (after Bellow and Eudora Welty) to
have his books enshrined in the Library of America.
“Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now,” Mr. Roth
once said. “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.”
The Nobel Prize eluded Mr. Roth, but he won most of the other top honors: two National Book
Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and
the Man Booker International Prize.
In his 60s, a time of life when many writers are winding down, he produced an exceptional sequence
of historical novels — “American Pastoral,” “The Human Stain” and “I Married a Communist” —
products of his personal re-engagement with America and American themes.
And starting with “Everyman” in 2006, when he was 73, he kept up a relentless book-a-year pace,
publishing works that while not necessarily major were nevertheless fiercely intelligent and sharply
observed. Their theme in one way or another was the ravages of age and mortality itself, and in
publishing them he seemed to be defiantly staving off his own decline.
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Mr. Roth was often lumped together with Bellow and Bernard Malamud as part of the “Hart,
Schaffner & Marx of American letters,” but he resisted the label. “The epithet American-Jewish
writer has no meaning for me,” he said. “If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.”
And yet, almost against his will sometimes, he was drawn again and again to writing about themes
of Jewish identity, anti-Semitism and the Jewish experience in America. He returned often,
especially in his later work, to the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, where he had grown up
and which became in his writing a kind of vanished Eden: a place of middle-class pride, frugality,
diligence and aspiration.
It was a place where no one was unaware “of the power to intimidate that emanated from the
highest and lowest reaches of gentile America,” he wrote, and yet where being Jewish and being
American were practically indistinguishable. Speaking of his father in “The Facts,” an
autobiography, Mr. Roth said: “His repertoire has never been large: family, family, family, Newark,
Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew. Somewhat like mine.”
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1. Fill in the chart with information about the text:
Genre
Register and style
Tone
Main function of
language
2. Identify the text type of the following quotations:
“Philip Roth, the prolific, protean, and often blackly comic
novelist… died on Tuesday night at a hospital in Manhattan.”
“He won most of the other top honors: two National Book
Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three
PEN/Faulkner Awards, a Pulitzer Prize…”
“He was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of
writers…”
“In his 60s, a time of life when many writers are winding down,
he produced an exceptional sequence of historical novels…”
“Mr. Roth had homes in Manhattan and Connecticut.”
“He was a pre-eminent figure in 20th-century literature.”
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3. Identify the text type of the text.
4. Reading comprehension:
a. Wy does the article describe Roth as ‘the last of the great white males’?
b. Was Roth awarded the Nobel Prize?
c. How did Roth feel about being labelled a ‘Jewish-American writer’?
d. Explain the meaning of the quote: ‘and in publishing them he seemed to be
defiantly staving off his own decline’
5. To which literary movement or era is Philip Roth most often associated?
6. How is the historical background reflected in the text?
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7. According to the text, what was his humour like?
He deals with unpleasant things in a humorous way: ‘blackly comic novelist’ (line 1)
8. Match the authors to the titles:
1. Saul Bellow a. Rabbit, Run
2. John Updike b. A Curtain of Green
3. Eudora Welty c. Herzog
d. The Witches of Eastwick
e. ‘The Petrified Man’
f. The Adventures of Augie March
9. Which topics did Eudora Welty write about?
10. Name 3 features of John Updike’s writing.
11. What makes Saul Bellow a revered figure in American literature? Which literary
movement is he most closely connected with?
12. Find a synonym in the text for each of the following words:
Support or defend
Devastation
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13. Define these words:
Towering
Protean
Lump together
14. Phonetic transcription:
Protean
Staving
Neighborhood
15. Identify the figure of speech of each of the following quotes:
‘I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole’
‘prolific, protean, and often blackly comic novelist’
‘family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew,
Jew.’
16. Identify the cohesive devices used in each case:
He was 85.
His creations include Alexander Portnoy.
The Nobel Prize eluded Mr. Roth, but he won most of the other
top honors