Philip Roth

Infobox Writer
name = Philip Roth
caption = deletable image-caption
birthdate = Birth date and age|1933|3|19|mf=y
birthplace = Newark, New Jersey
deathdate =
deathplace =
occupation = novelist
genre = Literary fiction
movement =
nationality = American
influences = Henry James, Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Henry Miller, Anne Frank, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad
influenced =
website =

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey ["Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of American Writers", 2001, p. 350] ) is an American novelist. He gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection "Goodbye, Columbus" (winner of 1960's National Book Award), cemented it with his 1969 bestseller "Portnoy's Complaint", and has continued to write critically acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels began 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, and graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in 1950. [Lubasch, Arnold H. [http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/20/reviews/roth-highschool.html "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."] Roth went on to attend Bucknell University, earning a degree in English. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received an M.A. in English literature and 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 academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1991.

While in Chicago, Roth met the novelist Saul Bellow, as well as Margaret Martinson, who became his first wife. Their separation in 1963, along with Martinson's death in a car crash in 1968, left a lasting mark on Roth's literary output. Specifically, 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". [Roth, Philip. "". New York, 1988. Roth discusses Martinson's portrait in this memoir. He calls her "Josie" in "When She Was Good" on pp. 149 and 175. He discusses her as an inspiration for "My Life As a Man" throughout the book's 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." (p. 149)]

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 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 "The Breast". By the end of the decade 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 with 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 about eros and death that revisits literary professor David Kepesh, protagonist of two 1970s works, "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire".

Events in Roth's personal life have occasionally 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 which was unflattering to Roth. Certain aspects of "I Married a Communist" have been regarded by critics as veiled rebuttals to accusations put forth in Bloom's memoir.

In one of his most audacious books to date, "The Plot Against America" (2004), Roth imagines an alternative version of American history: What if Charles A. Linbergh, aviator hero and isolationist had been elected U.S. president in 1940? In the imagined history that follows, Roth gives an account of a U.S. that negotiates an understanding with Hitler's Nazi Germany and embarks on its own program of anti-Semitism. It has been hailed as Roth's masterpiece. " [H] uge, inflammatory, painfully moving… It may well be his best, and it may well arouse more controversy than all the rest combined.… That Roth has written "The Plot Against America" in some respects as a parable for our times seems to me inescapably and rather regrettably true." [cite news |first=Jonathan |last=Yardley |work=The Washington Post |title=Homeland Insecurity |date=October 3, 2004 |page=BW02 |url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63751-2004Sep30.html]

Roth's 182-page novel "Everyman", a meditation on illness, desire, and death, was published in May 2006.

"Exit Ghost", which features his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, was released in October 2007. According to the book's publisher, it is the last Zuckerman novel [ [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/books/30roth.html "Zuckerman’s Last Hurrah"] . "New York Times". November 30, 2006.] .

"Indignation", Roth's twenty-ninth book, was published on September 16, 2008. Set in 1951 to the backdrop of the Korean War, it follows Marcus Messner's departure from Newark to Ohio's Winesburg College, where he begins his sophomore year.

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 the author Philip Roth and his fictional lives and voices, including narrators and protagonists such as David Kepesh and Nathan Zuckerman or even the character "Philip Roth", of which there are two in "Operation Shylock".

In Roth's fiction, the question of authorship is intertwined with the theme of the idealistic, secular Jewish-American son who attempts to distance himself from Jewish customs and traditions, and from what he perceives as the time's suffocating influence of parents, rabbis and other community leaders. Jewish sons such as most infamously Alexander Portnoy and later Nathan Zuckerman rebel by denouncing Judaism, while at the same time remaining attached to a sense of Jewish identity. Roth's fiction has been described by critics as pervaded by "a kind of alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it." [cite journal |last=Greenberg |first=Robert |year=1997 |month=Winter |title=Trangression in the Fiction of Philip Roth |journal=Twentieth Century Literature |url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n4_v43/ai_20614549 |doi=10.2307/441747 |volume=43 |pages=487]

Roth's first work, "Goodbye, Columbus", had been severely criticized by rabbis and readers as crude and infused with a sense of self-loathing.Fact|date=November 2007 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: "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." [cite journal |last=Roth |first=Philip |year=1963 |month=December |title=Writing About Jews |journal=Commentary] This echoes a similar theme explored by Canadian-Jewish author, Mordecai Richler, in his early works like "Son of A Smaller Hero".Fact|date=September 2008

In Roth's fiction, the exploration of "promiscuous instincts" within the context of Jewish-American lives, mainly from a male viewpoint plays an important role. Such promiscuity entails not only sexual promiscuity but also more generally a transgression of Jewish-American cultural values and norms, such as observance of the Jewish dietary laws, respect for the conventions of Judaism, and marrying a Jewish spouse. Through transgressions such as ignoring dietary laws, ridiculing Judaism, dating "shiksas" and engaging in "immoral" sexual activities, Roth's characters achieve a sense of liberation. But the resulting sense of freedom in Roth's fiction also results in feelings of alienation and emptiness, particularly in the context of the rapid cultural changes in the US that have taken place during Roth's lifetime. In the words of critic Hermione Lee: "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 travelled towards: liberty, peace, security, a decent liberal democracy."Lee, Hermione. "Philip Roth". New York: Methuen & Co. 1982]

While Roth's fiction has strong autobiographical influences, it has also incorporated social commentary and political satire, most obviously in "Our Gang" and "Operation Shylock". Since the 1990s, Roth's fiction has often combined autobiographical elements with retrospective dramatizations of postwar American life.

Roth has described "American Pastoral" and the two following novels as a loosely connected "American trilogy". All these novels deal with 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 more 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 during the war years, despite the promotion of increasingly influential anti-racist ideals in wartime. Nonetheless, the 1940s, and the New Deal era that preceded it, are portrayed in much of Roth's recent fiction as a heroic phase in American history. A sense of frustration with social and political developments in the US since the 1940s is palpable in the American trilogy and "Exit Ghost", but had already been present on much earlier works which contained political and social satire, such as "Our Gang" and "The Great American Novel". Writing about the latter novel, Hermione Lee points to the sense 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'."

Awards and honors

Philip Roth is one of the most celebrated living American writers. 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. [Bloom, Harold. [http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/24/dumbing_down_american_readers/ "Dumbing down American readers"] . "The Boston Globe". September 24, 2003.] 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 WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, an award Roth has received twice. [ [http://facstaff.unca.edu/moseley/smith.html WH Smith Award ] ] 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 [PEN American Center. [http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/1406/prmID/1331 "Philip Roth Wins Inaugural PEN/Saul Bellow Award"] . April 2, 2007.] .

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.'" 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 New York Times Book Review". [http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/fiction-25-years.html "What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?"] . May 21, 2006.] 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." [Scott, A.O. [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/scott-essay.html "In Search of the Best"] . "The New York Times". May 21, 2006.]

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" (2007)

Roth novels

* "" (1990)
* "" (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)
* "Indignation" (2008)
* "The Humbling" (2009)

Memoirs

* "" (1988)
* "" (1991)

Collections

* "Reading Myself and Others" (1976)
* "A Philip Roth Reader" (1980, revised edition 1993)
* "Shop Talk" (2001)

Library of America Editions

Edited by Ross Miller
* "Novels and Stories 1959-1962" (2005) ISBN 978-1-93108279-2.
* "Novels 1967-1972" (2005) ISBN 978-1-93108280-8.
* "Novels 1973-1977" (2006) ISBN 978-1-93108296-9.
* "Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985" (2007) ISBN 978-1-59853-011-7.
* "Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991" (2008) ISBN 978-1-59853-030-8.

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 [http://www-news.uchicago.edu/resources/arts/]
* 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

External links

* [http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4939 Literary Encyclopedia biography]
* [http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/proth.htm Books and Writers biography]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/11/specials/roth.html "The New York Times" Featured Author: Philip Roth]
* [http://www.rothsociety.org The Philip Roth Society]
* [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4865614 Roth interview] - from NPR's "Fresh Air", September 2005
* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1666780,00.html Roth interview] - from "The Guardian", December 2005
* [http://www.radioopensource.org/philip-roth-re-fed/ Roth interview] - from "Open Source"
* [http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,534018,00.html Roth interview] - from "Der Spiegel", February 2008
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NmXqpdupTk Roth video interview Part 1]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=351Ggfh0FZ0 Roth video interview Part 2]
* [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5390578 Philip Roth Discusses "Everyman"] - from NPR's "Fresh Air", May 2006
* [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5376625 "Roth Returns with Life and Death of "Everyman"] - from NPR, May 2006
* [http://www.weequahicalumni.org/scripts/history.cfm?pageSubTitle=School%20History&cfid=4051&cftoken=f6896a01fe47a552-58C2398C-142A-0DD9-D758F83478582C44 Weequahic Alumni Assn.]
*cite news | last =| first =| coauthors =| title =Philip Roth: Literary hit man with a 9/11 bullet in his gun| work =| pages =| language =| publisher =The Sunday Times| date =2004-09-19| url =http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article484395.ece| accessdate =2007-09-23
*cite news | last =Amidon| first =Stephen | coauthors =| title =A guide to Philip Roth| work =| pages =| language =| publisher =The Sunday Times| date =2007-09-23| url =http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2499856.ece| accessdate =2007-09-23
* [http://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2008/sep/18/long-haul/ Philip Roth looks back on a legendary career, and forward to his final act]
* [http://lasvegasweekly.com/news/2008/sep/18/righteous-anger/ Righteous anger: Philip Roth’s latest gives us a world caught between wars]

Further reading and literary criticism

*Alan Cooper, "Philip Roth and the Jews" (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture), 1996 (ISBN 0-7914-2910-5)
*Till Kinzel, "Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens. Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie" (American Studies Monograph Series), Heidelberg: Winter, 2006 (ISBN 3-8253-5223-4)
*S. Milowitz, "Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer", 2000 (ISBN 0-8153-3957-7)
*Norman Podhoretz, "The Adventures of Philip Roth," "Commentary" (October 1998), reprinted as "Philip Roth, Then and Now" in "The Norman Podhoretz Reader" (2004), 327-48
*Derek Parker Royal, "Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author", 2005 (ISBN 0-275-98363-3)
*Elaine B. Safer, "Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth" (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture), 2006 (ISBN 0-7914-6709-0)
*George J. Searles, ed., "Conversations With Philip Roth", 1992 (ISBN 978-0878055586)
*Debra B. Shostak, "Philip Roth-Countertexts, Counterlives", 2004 (ISBN 1-57003-542-3)
*Wiebke-Maria Wöltje, "My finger on the pulse of the nation. Intellektuelle Protagonisten im Romanwerk Philip Roths" (Mosaic, 26), Trier: WVT, 2006 (ISBN 3-88476-827-1)