Philip Milton Roth

Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, the son of American-born parents and the grandson of European Jews who were part of the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to the United States. He grew up in the city's lower-middle-class section of Weequahic and was educated in Newark public schools. He later attended Bucknell University, where he received his B.A., and the University of Chicago, where he completed his M. A. and taught English. Afterwards, at both Iowa and Princeton, hetaught creative writing, and for many years he taught comparativeliterature at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired fromteaching in 1992.His first book was Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a novella and fivestories that use wit, irony, and humor to depict Jewish life inpost-war America. The book won him critical recognition, includingthe National Book Award for fiction, and along with that,condemnation from some within the Jewish community fordepicting what they saw as the unflattering side of cotemporary Jewish American experience. His first full-length novel was Letting Go (1962), a Jamesian realistic work that explores many of the societal and ethical issues of the 1950s. This was followed in 1967 by When She Was Good, another novel in the realistic mode that takes as its focus a rare narrative voice in Roth's fiction: a young Midwestern female.He is perhaps best known--notoriously so, to many--for his third novel, Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a wildly comic representation of his middle-class New York Jewish world in the portrait of Alexander Portnoy, whose possessive mother makes him soguilty and insecure that he can seek relief only in elaborate masturbation and sex with forbidden shiksas. For readers of that hilarious novel, eating liver would never be the same (read the book and you'll understand).Portnoy's Complaint was not only the New York Time's best seller for the year 1969, it also made a celebrity out of Roth. . . an uncomfortable position that he would later fictionalize in such novels as Zuckerman Unbound(1981) and Operation Shylock (1993). Following the publication of Portnoy Complaint, Roth experimented with different comic modes, at times outrageous,asillustrated in the works Our Gang (1971), a parodic attackon Richard Nixon; The Breast(1972), a Kafkaesquerendering of sexual desire; The Great American Novel(1973), a wild satire of both Frank Norris's novelistic questand the great American pastime, baseball; and the shortstory "On the Air."In My Life As a Man (1974), Roth not only introduces hismost developed protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, but butfor the first time his fiction becomes highly self-reflexiveand postmodern. One of his most significant literaryefforts is the Zuckerman trilogy: The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and wrapped up with a novella epilogue, "The Prague Orgy" (1985). These novels trace the development of Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, from an aspiring young writer to a socially compromised, and psychologically besieged, literary celebrity. In The Counterlife (1986), perhaps his most ambitious and meticulously structured novel, Roth brings a temporarily end to his Zuckerman writings. It is also the first time that the author engages in a sustained examination of the relationship between American and Israeli Jews.His next four books--The Facts (1988),Deception (1990),Patrimony (1991),and Operation Shylock--explore the relationship between the lived world and the written world, between "fact" and "fiction." Through his protagonist in these works, also named Philip Roth, the author questions the genres of autobiography and fiction, and he mischievously encourages the reader to become caught up in this literary game. Of these four books, only one, Deception, is billed as a novel. The other three are subtitled as either an autobiography (The Facts), a memoir or "true story" (Patrimony), or a confession (Operation Shylock). The most elaborate of these, Operation Shylock, is arguably Roth's finest work, leading fellow writer Cynthia Ozick to call it in one of her interviews, "the Great American Jewish Novel" and Roth "the boldest American writer alive."His most recent novel, The Plot Against America, takes Roth into fresh literary territory. It is an alternative history whose premise is the 1940 election of Charles A. Lindbergh to the White House. What, Roth asks, would America have been like had the isolationist and anti-Semitic Lindbergh defeated F.D.R., reached a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, and kept the United States out of the Second WorldWar? Reminiscent of the four works preceding it, the new novel appears to continue the author’s exploration of American identities, national as well as individual, within the contexts of its history.In The Dying Animal (2001), Roth revisits the life of David Kepesh, the protagonist of The Breast and The Professor of Desire(1977). As in the earlier novels, Kepesh is concerned with the erotic side of existence and, as he puts it, "emancipated manhood." Yet even though its focus in explicitly sexual, this novel, like almost all of Roth's other works, has as its theme the ways in whichindividuals--specifically men--live with desire in the largersense of the word. One of the hallmarks of Roth's fictionis the ways in which sexual, communal, familial, ethnic,artistic, and political freedoms play themselves out on thefield of contemporary existence.Unlike many prolific novelists, whose productive qualitiesmay tend to wane over time, Roth has demonstrated aunique ability not only to sustain his literary output, buteven surpass the scope and talent inherent in his previouswritings. His latter fiction is arguable his best work, asdemonstrated by the succession of awards he received in the 1990s (and a Nobel Prize in Literature a very likely possibility). He has lived in Rome, London, Chicago, and New York. He currently lives in Connecticut. His awards and honors include:Aga Khan Award, Paris Review, 1958Houghton-Mifflin literary fellowship, 1959National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, 1959National Book Award for Fiction for Goodbye, Columbus, 1960Daroff Award, Jewish Book Council of America for Goodbye, Columbus, 1960Second prize in the O. Henry Prize Story Contest for "Defender of the Faith," 1960Guggenheim fellowship, 1960Ford Foundation grant in playwriting, 1965Elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1970American Book Award nomination for The Ghost Writer, 1980National Books Critics Circle nomination for The Anatomy Lesson, 1983American Book Award nomination for The Anatomy Lesson, 1984National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife, 1987National Arts Club Medal of Honor, 1991National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony, 1992PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Operation Shylock, 1993Time magazine's Best American Novel of the year for Operaton Shylock, 1993Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in the Arts, 1993Karl Capek Prize (Czech Republic), 1994National Book Award for fiction, Sabbath's Theater, 1995National Book Critics Circle nomination for American Pastoral, 1997National Book Award nomination for American Pastoral, 1997Pulitzer Prize for fiction, American Pastoral, 1997Ambassador Book Award, English-Speaking Union, for I Married a Communist, 1998National Medal of Arts, 1998PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Human Stain, 2000Time magazine's America's Best Novelist, 2001American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Metal for Fiction, 2001Franz Kafka Prize (Czech Republic), 2001France's Medicis foreign book prize for The Human Stain, 2002National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to AmericanLetters, 2002A conversation with Philip RothPhilip Roth rarely gives interviews. He did, however, agree to answer some faxed questions about his work from Robert McCrumSunday July 1, 2001The ObserverRobert McCrum: What made you return to David Kepesh, the hero of The Breast and The Professor of Desire?Philip Roth: The need, after three books, to move away from Nathan Zuckerman as a narrator.I was beginning to feel constrained by Zuckerman's perspective and by his condition as a man alone in the rural wilds of New England whose own story, he believes, has ended and who now lives vicariously through the stories of others. I think he served me well in the trilogy as both an observer and an imagination, but I needed a change.RMcC: Was there a specific moment of inspiration for The Dying Animal?PR: Yes. A man I know told me that a beautiful and shapely young woman with whom he had an intense erotic affair some 10 years earlier, when she was in her twenties, had showed up unexpectedly at his apartment one night to tell him that she had breast cancer. He hadn't seen her in the intervening decade and was so shocked by the news that he burst into tears. The Dying Animal took shape around that anecdote, which, after I heard it, I was unable to forget.RMcC: How does this novel relate, in your mind, to American Pastoral and The Human Stain?PR: Again, it was mainly undertaken as an escape from the concerns of the three books that preceded it (I include I Married a Communist). The only similarity is that Kepesh takes a historical view of the development of what he calls his 'emancipated manhood', and describes his sexual independence as a bequest of the 1960s. He contemplates at some length a radical side of the Sixties that is left out of American Pastoral, and, after his twenties, when he marries and has a child, he lives for the rest of his life taking seriously the values at the heart of what was called 'the sexual revolution'.RMcC: Do you think sex is the Western novel's deepest theme?PR: I don't know.RMcC: So what is the purpose of fiction?PR: God only knows.RMcC: What do you mean by 'the pornography of jealousy'?PR: The sexual imaginings that are inspired by jealousy. The pornography that is a torture to watch rather than a pleasure, because, as Kepesh says, 'you identify yourself not with the satiate, with the person who is getting it, but with the person not getting it, with the person losing it, with the person who has lost'.RMcC: Is American culture, as you see it, the upshot of a dialogue between rule and misrule, between William Bradford and Thomas Morton?PR: Bradford was the governor of the Puritan colony at Plymouth and Thomas Morton presided over the trading outpost at nearby Merry Mount that offended the Puritans by its licentiousness. The Plymouth Puritans were particularly outraged by the Merry Mount men openly cohabiting with Indian women. Kepesh, who is a bit of a historian, finds in the seventeenth-century struggle between Bradford and Morton 'the colonial harbinger of the national upheaval three hundred and thirty-odd years later' - the American 1960s - 'when Morton's America was born at last, miscegenation and all'.These observations are Kepesh's, not mine, and demonstrate the thoughtfulness that Kepesh characteristically applies to understanding and explaining his way of life. The three Kepesh books depict three alternative erotic lives - think of the trilogy as a sequence of dreams, here and there at variance with one another in the manner of dreams but essentially putting the same intelligent and rational hero through his life's self-defining ordeal: having to think his way through a sizable sexual predicament laden with contradiction and incongruities.RMcC: What is the most encouraging feature of contemporary American culture?PR: I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I think we've got a substantial group of original and talented writers who've been at work in America for the past 20 or 30 years, but their readership gets duller and smaller by the year. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.RMcC: Who are the writers - alive or dead - whom you most admire?PR: To my mind, the greatest American writers of the last century were William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they form the backbone of twentieth-century American literature. I don't write like either of them. Who could? But I read them again and again. As I Lay Dying and The Adventures of Augie March. It's hard to think of two better novels written in this country in any century.RMcC: What are you working on now?PR: The beginning of a new novel. I'm hoping that it takes me the rest of my life to finish it. I can't take starting from scratch one more time.。