PHILIP ROTH

'Philip Milton Roth' (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey) is an American novelist. He gained early literary fame for the 1959 collection ''Goodbye, Columbus'', grabbed headlines with his 1969 bestseller ''Portnoy's Complaint'', and has continued to write noted literary works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels started with ''The Ghost Writer'' in 1979, and include the Pulitzer Prize-winning ''American Pastoral'' (1997).

Life and career

Roth grew up in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, as the second child of first-generation American parents, Jews of Galician descent, who graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in 1950.^[1] Roth went on to attend Bucknell University, where he earned a degree in English. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received an M.A. in English literature and then worked briefly as an instructor in the university's writing program. Roth went on to teach creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. He continued his teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1992.
During his Chicago stay, Roth met the novelist Saul Bellow, as well as Margaret Martinson, who eventually became his first wife. Though the two separated in 1963, and Martinson died in a car crash in 1968, Roth's dysfunctional marriage to her left an important mark on his literary output. Specifically, Martinson was the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth's novels, including Maureen Tarnopol in ''My Life As a Man'', and, most likely, 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 United States 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 novels, ''Letting Go'' and ''When She Was Good''. However, 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 and novellas that followed between 1979-1986, Zuckerman appeared as either the main character or as an interlocutor.
In ''Sabbath's Theater'' (1995), Roth presented his most lecherous protagonist yet in Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced former puppeteer. In complete contrast, the first volume of Roth's second Zuckerman trilogy, 1997's ''American Pastoral'', focuses on the life of virtuous Newark athletics star Swede Levov and the tragedy that befalls him when his teenage daughter transforms into a domestic terrorist during the late 1960s. ''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 on the subject of eros and death that revisits literary professor David Kepesh, protagonist of two 1970s works, ''The Breast'' and ''The Professor of Desire''.
In early 2004, the Philip Roth Society (not in any way affiliated with Roth or his publishers) announced the foundation of the journal, ''Philip Roth Studies''. The inaugural issue was released in Spring 2005 and published by Heldref Publications. The 2004 annual of ''Studies in American Jewish Literature'', devoted entirely to Roth's most recent work, in many ways served as the critical springboard for ''Philip Roth Studies''.
Events in Roth's personal life have sometimes been the subject of media scrutiny. According to his pseudo-confessional novel ''Operation Shylock'' (1993), Roth suffered a nervous breakdown in the late 1980s. In 1990, he married his long-time companion, English actress Claire Bloom. In 1994 they separated, and in 1996 Bloom published a memoir, ''Leaving a Doll's House'', which described the couple's marriage in detail. Much of it was unflattering to Roth.
Roth's 182-page novel ''Everyman'', a meditation on illness, desire, and death, was published in May 2006.
Roth's next book, ''Exit Ghost'', features the Zuckerman character and is expected to be released in October, 2007. According to the book's publisher, it will be the last Zuckerman novel ^[2].

Awards and honors

Philip Roth is arguably the most decorated American 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 three PEN/Faulkner Awards (''Operation Shylock'', ''The Human Stain'', and ''Everyman'') and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1997 novel, ''American Pastoral''. In 2001, ''The Human Stain'' was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 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.^[3] His 2004 novel ''The Plot Against America'' won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005 as well as the Society of American Historians’ prize. Roth was also awarded the United Kingdom's W.H. Smith Award for the best book of the year, an award Roth has received twice.^[4] 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 immortalized in ''The Plot Against America''. A plaque on the house where the Roths lived was also unveiled. In May 2006, he was given 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.
The May 21, 2006 issue of ''The New York Times Book Review'' ^[5] 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.'" Of the 22 books cited, six of Roth's novels were selected: ''American Pastoral'', ''The Counterlife'', ''Operation Shylock'', ''Sabbath's Theater'', ''The Human Stain'', and ''The Plot Against America''. 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." ^[6]

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)

★ ''Exit Ghost'' (Expected October 2007)

Roth books

★ '' (1988)

★ '' (1990)

★ '' (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)

★ ''Everyman'' (2006)

Collections

★ ''Reading Myself and Others'' (1976)

★ ''A Philip Roth Reader'' (1980)

★ ''Shop Talk'' (2001)

★ Miller, Ross, ed. ''Philip Roth, Novels and Stories 1959-1962'' (Library of America, 2005) ISBN 978-1-93108279-2.

★ Miller, Ross, ed. ''Philip Roth, Novels 1967-1972'' (Library of America, 2005) ISBN 978-1-93108280-8.

★ Miller, Ross, ed. ''Philip Roth, Novels 1973-1977'' (Library of America, 2006) ISBN 978-1-93108296-9.

★ Miller, Ross, ed. ''Philip Roth, Novels 1979-1985'' (Library of America, 2007).

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''

★ 1994 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 Arts [1]

★ 2000 Prix du Meilleur livre étranger (France) for ''American Pastoral''

★ 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for ''The Human Stain''

★ 2001 Gold Medal In Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters

★ 2001 WH Smith Literary Award for ''The Human Stain''

★ 2002 National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

★ 2002 Prix Médicis étranger (France) for ''The Human Stain''

★ 2003 Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Harvard University

★ 2005 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for ''The Plot Against America''

★ 2006 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement

★ 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award for ''Everyman''

★ 2007 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

References

1. Lubasch, Arnold H. "Philip Roth Shakes Weequahic High", ''The New York Times'', February 28, 1969. Accessed September 8, 2007. "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."
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/books/30roth.html
3. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/24/dumbing_down_american_readers/
4. http://facstaff.unca.edu/moseley/smith.html
5. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/review/index.html
6. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/scott-essay.html?ex=1149134400&en=2b8a4ddd55fa9cae&ei=5070

External links

★ Literary Encyclopedia biography

★ Books and Writers biography

★ ''The New York Times'' Featured Author: Philip Roth

★ The Philip Roth Society

★ Roth interview - from NPR's "Fresh Air", September 2005

★ Roth interview - from ''The Guardian'', December 2005

★ Roth interview - from ''Open Source''

★ Roth video interview Part 1

★ Roth video interview Part 2

★ Philip Roth Discusses ''Everyman'' - from NPR's "Fresh Air", May 2006

★ "Roth Returns with Life and Death of ''Everyman''" - from NPR, May 2006

★ Weequahic Alumni Assn.

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PHILIP ROTH

Life and career

Awards and honors

Bibliography

Zuckerman novels

Roth books

Kepesh novels

Other novels

Collections

Awards

References

See also

External links

Further reading and literary criticism

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