Philip Roth Biography

Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer.

Roth’s fiction, regularly set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its “sensual, ingenious style” and for its provocative explorations of American identity.

Roth first gained attention with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus; the collection so titled received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. He became one of the most awarded American writers of his generation. His books twice received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, a character in many of Roth’s novels. The Human Stain (2000), another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom’s WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2001, in Prague, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize.

Early life and academic pursuits

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19, 1933, and grew up at 81 Summit Avenue in the Weequahic neighborhood. Roth’s family was Jewish, and his parents were second-generation Americans.  He graduated from Newark’s Weequahic High School in or around 1950.

Academic career

Roth attended Rutgers University in Newark for a year, then transferred to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where he earned a B.A. magna cum laude in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. in English literature in 1955 and briefly worked as an instructor in the university’s writing program.

That same year, rather than wait to be drafted, Roth enlisted in the army, but he suffered a back injury during basic training and was given a medical discharge. He returned to Chicago in 1956 to study for a PhD in literature but dropped out after one term. Roth taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. He later continued his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1991.

Writing career

Roth’s work first appeared in print in the Chicago Review while he was studying, and later teaching, at the University of Chicago. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, contains the novella Goodbye, Columbus and four short stories. It won the National Book Award in 1960. He published his first full-length novel, Letting Go, in 1962. In 1967 he published When She Was Good, set in the WASP Midwest in the 1940s. It is based in part on the life of Margaret Martinson Williams, whom Roth married in 1959.The publication in 1969 of his fourth and most controversial novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, gave Roth widespread commercial and critical success, causing his profile to rise significantly. During the 1970s Roth experimented in various modes, from the political satire Our Gang (1971) to the Kafkaesque The Breast (1972). By the end of the decade Roth had created his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. In a series of highly self-referential novels and novellas that followed between 1979 and 1986, Zuckerman appeared as either the main character or an interlocutor.

Sabbath’s Theater (1995) may have Roth’s most lecherous protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced former puppeteer; it won his second National Book Award.In complete contrast, American Pastoral (1997), the first volume of his so-called second Zuckerman trilogy, focuses on the life of virtuous Newark star athlete Swede Levov, and the tragedy that befalls him when Levov’s teenage daughter becomes a domestic terrorist during the late 1960s; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 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 (1977). In The Plot Against America (2004), Roth imagines an alternative American history in which Charles Lindbergh, aviator hero and isolationist, is elected U.S. President in 1940, and the U.S. negotiates an understanding with Hitler’s Nazi Germany and embarks on its own program of anti-Semitism.

Roth’s novel Everyman, a meditation on illness, aging, desire, and death, was published in May 2006. It was Roth’s third book to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, making him the only person so honored. Exit Ghost, which again features Nathan Zuckerman, was released in October 2007. It was the last Zuckerman novel. Indignation, Roth’s 29th book, was published on September 16, 2008. Set in 1951, during the Korean War, it follows Marcus Messner’s departure from Newark to Ohio’s Winesburg College, where he begins his sophomore year. In 2009, Roth’s 30th book, The Humbling, was published. It tells the story of the last performances of Simon Axler, a celebrated stage actor. Roth’s 31st book, Nemesis, was published on October 5, 2010. According to the book’s notes, Nemesis is the last in a series of four “short novels,” after Everyman, Indignation and The Humbling. In October 2009, during an interview with Tina Brown of The Daily Beast to promote The Humbling, Roth considered the future of literature and its place in society, stating his belief that within 25 years the reading of novels will be regarded as a “cultic” activity:

I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range. … To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by—it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities.

When asked about the prospects for printed versus digital books, Roth was equally downbeat:

The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. … Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.

This was not the first time Roth had expressed pessimism about the future of the novel and its significance in recent years. Talking to The Observer‘s Robert McCrum in 2001, he said, “I’m not good at finding ‘encouraging’ features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.”In an October 2012 interview with the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, Roth announced that he would be retiring from writing and confirmed subsequently in Le Monde that he would no longer publish fiction. In a May 2014 interview with Alan Yentob for the BBC, Roth said, “this is my last appearance on television, my absolutely last appearance on any stage anywhere.”