Roth, Philip

Roth, Philip (1933–), New Jersey‐born author, after graduation from Bucknell and an M.A. from the University of Chicago taught English there and creative writing at Iowa and Princeton. His first book, for which he won a National Book Award, was Goodbye, Columbus (1959), whose title novella and five short stories present witty, ironic, and perceptive depictions of Jewish life in the U.S. in a flip, personal style. Letting Go (1962), his first novel, employs something of the same vein less successfully in treating the lives of young Jewish intellectuals at the University of Chicago, in New York, and elsewhere. His succeeding fiction is When She Was Good (1967), a removal from his basic subject and territory in treating a Midwestern Protestant housewife who is destructively dedicated to reforming first her father, then her husband; Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a wildly comic depiction of his middle‐class New York Jewish world in the portrait of Alexander Portnoy, whose possessive mother makes him so guiltily insecure that he can seek relief only in elaborate masturbation and sex with forbidden Gentile girls; Our Gang (1971), a broad satire of President Trick E. Dixon; The Breast (1972), a novella about a male professor of literature who suffers a Kafka‐like transformation into a gigantic breast; The Great American Novel (1973), at once a burlesque and an allegory, its telling of the downfall of a great baseball team serving as a satirical parallel to contemporary American political and social events; My Life as a Man (1974), depicting the personal and literary frustrations of an author, partly through two of his short stories; and The Professor of Desire (1977), a novel about the romances of the Jewish professor who was the subject of The Breast. The Ghost Writer (1979) is a brief but intricate tale about a young writer who, when accused of travestying his fellow Jews, seeks counsel from a respected older Jewish author and finds this distinguished figure ambiguously involved with a girl whom the young writer fantasizes to be Anne Frank. Zuckerman Unbound (1981) is a sequel about the young writer years later as a major American author and his poignant personal life; The Anatomy Lesson (1983) is a third portrayal of Zuckerman, aged 40 and having lost “his health, his hair, and his subject”; and Zuckerman Bound (1985) prints the trilogy and an epilogue, The Prague Orgy, briefly treating Zuckerman's concern with the work of a recently deceased Jewish writer from Prague. Zuckerman, psychosomatically sick, caught in a writer's block, and castigated by an academic critic as the writer of trivial, scurrilous, and anti‐Semitic fiction, yearns for a new career as a doctor. The Counterlife (1986) is another novel about Nathan Zuckerman bound up with problems varying from physical sexual issues to those related to a visit to Israel. The Facts (1988) continues the Zuckerman saga in a book that is a letter to his character in which the author dwells upon his own real life with some invention. A more exotic conception of real life occurs in Roth's next novel, Deception (1990), setting forth a conversation about love between an American novelist named Philip and some women. Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993) is a novel in which a novelist called Philip Roth, suffering from a breakdown, learns that an impostor using his name in Israel is advocating “Diasporism”–that Jews should quit Israel to avoid an Arab Holocaust and should again settle in their true home, Europe. Sabbath's Theater (1995, National Book Award) is an erotic black comedy about an aging puppeteer. American Pastoral (1997, Pulitzer Prize) explores the American experience in the Vietnam era. I Married a Communist (1998) is a study of political hypocrisy set in the McCarthy era. The Human Stain (2000), set in the 1990s, unfolds against a backdrop of the U.S. presidential impeachment hearings. Roth's most recent novels are The Dying Animal (2001) and The Plot Against America (2004). Reading Myself (1975) collects interviews, essays, and articles. Patrimony (1991) is a memoir about his father's life and death.