Philip Roth

Roth, Philip - 1933–, American author, b. Newark, N.J., grad. Univ. of Chicago (M.A., 1955). His writings, noted for their irony and themes of identity, rebellion, and sexuality, deal largely with middle-class Jewish-American life. Roth gained his initial literary reputation with the short-story collection Good-bye Columbus (1959). Portnoy's Complaint (1969), his most famous novel, has been widely acclaimed a comic masterpiece. His many other works include the novels The Breast (1972), The Great American Novel (1973), My Life as a Man (1974), The Ghost Writer (1979) Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Zuckerman Bound (1985), The Counterlife (1987), The Facts (1988), Operation Shylock (1993), the trilogy American Pastoral (1997; Pulitzer Prize), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), and The Dying Animal (2001). His flood of later novels, which portray American life in the last decades of the 20th cent. with a mixture of comedy and savagery, have often been imaginative amalgams of autobiography and fiction, with doppelgänger Nathan Zuckerman standing in for the author. Roth also has written a nonfiction account of his father's death, Patrimony: A True Story (1991).

See his essays, Reading Myself and Others (1985); studies by S. Pinsker (1975) and A. Z. Milbauer and D. G. Watson, ed. (1988).

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