Philip Milton Roth (/rɒθ/;[1] March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018)[2] was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace ofNewark, 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 ofJewish and American identity.[3] He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collectionGoodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S.National Book Award for Fiction.[4][5] Ten years later, he published the bestsellerPortnoy's Complaint.Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate historyThe Plot Against America.
Roth was one of the most honored Jewish American writers of his generation.[6] He received theNational Book Critics Circle award forThe Counterlife, thePEN/Faulkner Award forOperation Shylock,The Human Stain, andEveryman, a second National Book Award forSabbath's Theater, and thePulitzer Prize forAmerican Pastoral. In 2001, Roth received the inauguralFranz Kafka Prize inPrague. In 2005, theLibrary of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, afterEudora Welty.[7]Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along withCormac McCarthy,Thomas Pynchon, andDon DeLillo.James Wood wrote: "More than any other post-war American writer, Roth wrote the self—the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced but above all constituted by and in writing. Maybe you have to go back to the very differentHenry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language... He would not cease from exploration; he could not cease, and the varieties of fiction existed for him to explore the varieties of experience."[8]
Philip Roth was born inNewark, New Jersey, on March 19, 1933,[9] and grew up at 81 Summit Avenue in theWeequahic neighborhood.[9] He was the second child of Bess (née Finkel) and Herman Roth, an insurance broker.[10] Roth's family wasJewish, and his parents were second-generation Americans. His paternal grandparents came from Kozlov nearLviv (then Lemberg) inAustrian Galicia, and his mother's ancestors were from the region ofKyiv in Ukraine. He graduated from Newark'sWeequahic High School in or around 1950.[11]
In 1969, Arnold H. Lubasch wrote inThe New York Times that the school "has provided the focus for the fiction of Philip Roth, the novelist who evokes his era at Weequahic High School in the highly acclaimedPortnoy's Complaint. Besides identifying Weequahic High School by name, the novel specifies such sites as the Empire Burlesque, the Weequahic Diner, theNewark 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." The 1950Weequahic Yearbook calls Roth a "boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense". He was known as a comedian during his time at school.[12]
Roth attendedRutgers University in Newark for a year, then transferred toBucknell University inPennsylvania, where he earned aB.A.magna cum laude in English and was elected toPhi Beta Kappa. He received a fellowship to attend theUniversity of Chicago, where he earned anM.A. inEnglish literature[13] in 1955 and briefly worked as an instructor in the university's writing program.[14] That same year, rather than wait to be drafted, Roth enlisted in the army, but suffered a back injury during basic training and was given amedical discharge. He returned to Chicago in 1956 to study for a PhD in literature, but dropped out after one term.[15] Roth was a longtime faculty member at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature until retiring from teaching in 1991.[14]
Roth's work first appeared in print in theChicago Review while he was studying, and later teaching, at theUniversity of Chicago.[16][17][18] His first book,Goodbye, Columbus, contains the novellaGoodbye, Columbus and four short stories. It won theNational Book Award in 1960. He published his first full-length novel,Letting Go, in 1962. In 1967 he publishedWhen She Was Good, set in theWASPMidwest in the 1940s. It is based in part on the life of Margaret Martinson Williams, whom Roth married in 1959.[15]
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.[5][19] During the 1970s Roth experimented in various modes, from the political satireOur Gang (1971) to theKafkaesqueThe 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.
Roth in 1973
Sabbath's Theater (1995) may have Roth's most lecherous protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced former puppeteer. It won his secondNational Book Award.[20] In complete contrast,American Pastoral (1997), the first volume of his so-called American Trilogy, focuses on the life of virtuous Newark star athlete Swede Levov, and the tragedy that befalls him when his teenage daughter becomes a domestic terrorist during the late 1960s. It won thePulitzer Prize for Fiction.[21]
Roth's novelEveryman, a meditation on illness, aging, desire, and death, was published in May 2006. It was Roth's third book to win thePEN/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.[22]Indignation, Roth's 29th book, was published on September 16, 2008. Set in 1951, during theKorean 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", afterEveryman,Indignation andThe Humbling. In October 2009, during an interview withTina Brown ofThe Daily Beast to promoteThe 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:[23]
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:[24]
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.
Roth in 2017
This was not the first time Roth had expressed pessimism about the future of the novel and its significance in recent years. Talking toThe Observer'sRobert 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."[23] In an October 2012 interview with the French magazineLes Inrockuptibles, Roth announced that he would be retiring from writing[25] and confirmed subsequently inLe Monde that he would no longer publish fiction.[26] In a May 2014 interview withAlan Yentob for theBBC, Roth said, "this is my last appearance on television, my absolutely last appearance on any stage anywhere."[27]
Reflecting on his writing career, in an afterword written on the 25th anniversary of the publication ofPortnoy's Complaint, Roth wrote, "I wished to dazzle in my very own way and to dazzle myself no less than anyone else."[28] To inspire himself to write, he recalled thinking, "All you have to do is sit down and work!"[28]
Much of Roth's fiction revolves around semi-autobiographical themes, while self-consciously and playfully addressing the perils of establishing connections between Roth and his fictional lives and voices.[29] Examples of this close relationship between the author's life and his characters' include narrators and protagonists such as David Kepesh andNathan Zuckerman as well as the character "Philip Roth", who appears inThe Plot Against America and of whom there are two inOperation Shylock. Critic Jacques Berlinerblau noted inThe Chronicle of Higher Education that these fictional voices create a complex and tricky experience for readers, deceiving them into believing they "know" Roth.[29]
In Roth's fiction the question of authorship is intertwined with the theme of the idealistic, secular Jewish son who attempts to distance himself from Jewish customs and traditions, and from what he perceives as the sometimes suffocating influence of parents, rabbis, and other community leaders.[30] Roth's fiction has been described by critics as pervaded by "a kind of alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it".[30]
Roth's first work,Goodbye, Columbus, was an irreverently humorous depiction of the life of middle-class Jewish Americans and received highly polarized reviews;[5] one reviewer found it infused with self-loathing. In response, Roth, in his 1963 essay "Writing About Jews" (collected inReading 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:[31]
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.
In Roth's fiction the exploration of "promiscuous instincts" within the context of Jewish lives, mainly from a male viewpoint, plays an important role. In the words of criticHermione Lee:[32]
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 traveled towards: liberty, peace, security, a decent liberal democracy.
While Roth's fiction has strong autobiographical influences, it also incorporates social commentary and political satire, most obviously inOur Gang andOperation Shylock. From the 1990s on, Roth's fiction often combined autobiographical elements with retrospective dramatizations of postwar American life. Roth describedAmerican Pastoral and the two following novels as a loosely connected "American trilogy". Each of these novels treats aspects of the postwar era against the backdrop of the nostalgically remembered Jewish American childhood of Nathan Zuckerman, in which the experience of life onthe American home front during the Second World War features prominently.[citation needed]American Pastoral looks at the legacy of the 1960s, as Swede Levov's daughter becomes an antiwar terrorist.I Married a Communist (1998), in which radio actor Ira Ringold is revealed as a communist sympathizer, is set in theMcCarthy era.The Human Stain, in which classics professor Coleman Silk's secret history is revealed, exploresidentity politics in the late 1990s.
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 Roth's comic novels, such asPortnoy's Complaint andSabbath's Theater. InThe Plot Against America, thealternate history of the war years dramatizes the prevalence ofanti-Semitism and racism in America at the time, despite the promotion of increasingly influential anti-racist ideals during the war. In his fiction, Roth portrayed the 1940s, and theNew Deal era of the 1930s that preceded it, as a heroic phase in American history. A sense of frustration with social and political developments in the United States since the 1940s is palpable in the American trilogy andExit Ghost, but had already been present in Roth's earlier works that contained political and social satire, such asOur Gang andThe Great American Novel. Writing about the latter, Hermione Lee points to the sense of 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'."[32] Although Roth's writings often explored the Jewish experience in America, Roth rejected being labeled aJewish American writer. "It's not a question that interests me. I know exactly what it means to be Jewish and it's really not interesting," he told theGuardian newspaper in 2005. "I'm an American."[33]
Roth was abaseball fan, and credited the game with shaping his literary sensibility. In an essay published inThe New York Times onOpening Day, 1973, Roth wrote that "baseball, with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategy, its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its 'characters,' its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate, was the literature of my boyhood... Of course, as time passed neither the flavor and suggestiveness ofRed Barber's narration, nor specific details, vivid and revealing even asRex Barney's pre-game hot dog, could continue to satisfy a developing literary appetite; there is no doubt, however, that they helped sustain me until I was old enough and literate enough to begin to respond to the great inventors of narrative detail and masters of narrative voice and perspective, likeJames andConrad andDostoyevsky andBellow."[34] Baseball features in several of Roth's novels; the hero ofPortnoy's Complaint dreams of playing likeDuke Snider, andNicholas Dawidoff calledThe Great American Novel "one of the most eccentric baseball novels ever written".[35]American Pastoral alludes toJohn R. Tunis's baseball novelThe Kid from Tomkinsville.
In a speech on his 80th birthday, Roth emphasized the importance of realistic detail in American literature:
the passion for specificity, the hypnotic materiality of the world one is in, is all but at the heart of the task to which every American novelist has been enjoined sinceHerman Melville and his whale andMark Twain and his river: to discover the most arresting, evocative verbal depiction of every last American thing. Without strong representation of the thing—animate or inanimate—without the crucial representation of what is real, there is nothing. Its concreteness, its unabashed focus on all the particulars, a fervor for the singular and a profound aversion to generalities is fiction's lifeblood. It is from a scrupulous fidelity to the blizzard of specific data that is a personal life, it is from the force of its uncompromising particularity, from its physicalness, that the realistic novel, the insatiable realistic novel with its multitude of realities, derives its ruthless intimacy. And its mission: to portray humanity in its particularity.[36]
While atChicago in 1956, Roth met Margaret Martinson, who became his first wife in 1959. Their separation in 1963, and Martinson's subsequent death in a car crash in 1968, left a lasting mark on Roth's literary output. Martinson was the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth's novels, including Lucy Nelson inWhen She Was Good and Maureen Tarnopol inMy Life as a Man.[37]
Roth was anatheist who once said, "When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place."[38][39] He also said during an interview withThe Guardian: "I'm exactly the opposite of religious, I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie ... It's not a neurotic thing, but the miserable record of religion—I don't even want to talk about it. It's not interesting to talk about the sheep referred to as believers. When I write, I'm alone. It's filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety—and I never needed religion to save me."[40]
In 1990, Roth married his longtime companion, English actressClaire Bloom, with whom he had been living since 1976. According to Bloom, when she asked him to marry her, he agreed on the condition that she sign a prenuptial agreement that would give her very little in the event of a divorce; he requested one in 1993 and made her a settlement of $100,000.[41] He also stipulated that Bloom's daughterAnna Steiger—from her marriage toRod Steiger—not live with them.[42] They divorced in 1994, and Bloom published a 1996 memoir,Leaving a Doll's House, that depicted Roth as amisogynist and control freak. Some critics have detected parallels between Bloom and the character Eve Frame in Roth'sI Married a Communist (1998).[15]
Roth died at aManhattan hospital ofheart failure on May 22, 2018, at the age of 85.[48][15][49] Roth was buried at theBard College Cemetery inAnnandale-on-Hudson, New York, where in 1999 he taught a class. He had originally planned to be buried next to his parents at the Gomel Chesed Cemetery in Newark, but changed his mind about 15 years before his death, in order to be buried close to where his friendNorman Manea is writer in residence,[50] and near other Jews "to whom he could talk".[51] Roth expressly banned any religious rituals from his funeral service, though it was noted that, the day after his burial, a pebble had been placed on top of his tombstone in accordance withJewish tradition.[52]
In October 2005, Roth was honored in his hometown when then-mayorSharpe 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 prominent inThe Plot Against America. A plaque on the house where the Roths lived was unveiled. In May 2006, he received thePEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007 he received the PEN/Faulkner award forEveryman, making him the award's only three-time winner. In April 2007, he received the firstPEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.[57]
The May 21, 2006, issue ofThe 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 identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years'".American Pastoral tied for fifth, andThe Counterlife,Operation Shylock,Sabbath's Theater,The Human Stain andThe Plot Against America received multiple votes. In the accompanying essay,A. O. Scott wrote: "Over the past 15 years, Roth's output has been so steady, so various and (mostly) so excellent that his vote has been, inevitably, split. If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction of the past 25 years, he would have won." Scott notes that "The Roth whose primary concern is the past—the elegiac, summarizing, conservative Roth—is preferred over his more aesthetically radical, restless, present-minded doppelgänger by a narrow but decisive margin."[58] In 2009, Roth received the German newspaperDie Welt'sWelt-Literaturpreis.[59]
In May 2011, Roth was awarded theMan Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction on the world stage, the fourth winner of the biennial prize.[62] One of the judges,Carmen Callil, a publisher of the feminist Virago house, withdrew in protest, referring to Roth's work as "Emperor's clothes". She said "he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe ... I don't rate him as a writer at all ...".[63] Observers noted that Callil had a conflict of interest, having published a book byClaire Bloom (Roth's ex-wife) that criticized Roth and lambasted their marriage.[63] In response, one of the two other Booker judges, Rick Gekoski, remarked:
In 1959 he writesGoodbye, Columbus and it's a masterpiece, magnificent. Fifty-one years later he's 78 years old and he writesNemesis and it is so wonderful, such a terrific novel ... Tell me one other writer who 50 years apart writes masterpieces ... If you look at the trajectory of the average novel writer, there is a learning period, then a period of high achievement, then the talent runs out and in middle age they start slowly to decline. People say why aren't Martin [Amis] and Julian [Barnes] getting on the Booker prize shortlist, but that's what happens in middle age. Philip Roth, though, gets better and better in middle age. In the 1990s he was almost incapable of not writing a masterpiece—The Human Stain,The Plot Against America,I Married a Communist. He was 65–70 years old, what the hell's he doing writing that well?[64]
In 2012 Roth received thePrince of Asturias Award for literature.[65] On March 19, 2013, his 80th birthday was celebrated in public ceremonies at the Newark Museum.[66]
One prize that eluded Roth was theNobel Prize in Literature, though he was nominated for the prize as early as 1972[67] and was a favorite of bookmakers and critics for decades.[68][69][70]Ron Charles ofThe Washington Post wrote that "thundering obituaries" around the world noted that "he won every other honor a writer could win", sometimes even two or three times, except the Nobel Prize.[71]
Roth worked hard to obtain his many awards, spending large amounts of time "networking, scratching people's backs, placing his people in positions, voting for them" in order to increase his chances of receiving awards.[72]
John Updike, considered by many Roth's chief literary rival, said in 2008, "He's scarily devoted to the novelist's craft... [he] seems more dedicated in a way to the act of writing as a means of really reshaping the world to your liking. But he's been very good to have around as far as goading me to become a better writer." Roth spoke at Updike's memorial service, saying, "He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor,Nathaniel Hawthorne."[88] After Updike's memorial at theNew York Public Library, Roth toldCharles McGrath, "I dream about John sometimes. He's standing behind me, watching me write." Asked who was better, Roth said, "John had more talent, but I think maybe I got more out of the talent I had." McGrath agreed with that assessment, adding that Updike might be the better stylist, but Roth's work was more consistent and "much funnier". McGrath added that in the 1990s Roth "underwent a kind of sea change and, borne aloft by that extraordinary second wind, produced some of his very best work":Sabbath's Theater and the American Trilogy (American Pastoral,I Married a Communist, andThe Human Stain).[89] Another admirer of Roth's work isBruce Springsteen. Roth read Springsteen's autobiography,Born to Run, and Springsteen praised Roth's American Trilogy: "I'll tell you, those three recent books by Philip Roth just knocked me on my ass.... To be in his sixties making work that is so strong, so full of revelations about love and emotional pain, that's the way to live your artistic life. Sustain, sustain, sustain."[90]
Roth left his book collection and more than $2 million to theNewark Public Library.[91][92] In 2021, the Philip Roth Personal Library opened for public viewing in the Newark Public Library.[93] In April 2021,W. W. Norton & Company publishedBlake Bailey's authorized biography of Roth,Philip Roth: The Biography. Publication was halted two weeks after release due to sexual assault allegations against Bailey.[94][95][96][97] Three weeks later, in May 2021,Skyhorse Publishing announced that it would release a paperback, ebook, and audiobook versions of the biography.[98] Roth had asked his executors "to destroy many of his personal papers after the publication of the semi-authorized biography on which Blake Bailey had recently begun work.... Roth wanted to ensure that Bailey, who was producing exactly the type of biography he wanted, would be the only person outside a small circle of intimates permitted to access personal, sensitive manuscripts, including the unpublishedNotes for My Biographer (a 295-page rebuttal to his ex-wife's memoir) andNotes on a Slander-Monger (another rebuttal, this time to a biographical effort from Bailey's predecessor). 'I don't want my personal papers dragged all over the place,' Roth said. The fate of Roth's personal papers took on new urgency in the wake of Norton's decision to halt distribution of the biography. In May 2021, the Philip Roth Society published an open letter[99] imploring Roth's executors 'to preserve these documents and make them readily available to researchers.'"[100][101][102]
After Roth's death,Harold Bloom told theLibrary of America: "Philip Roth's departure is a dark day for me and for many others. His two greatest novels,American Pastoral andSabbath's Theater, have a controlled frenzy, a high imaginative ferocity, and a deep perception of America in the days of its decline. TheZuckerman tetralogy remains fully alive and relevant, and I should mention too the extraordinary invention ofOperation Shylock, the astonishing achievement ofThe Counterlife, and the pungency ofThe Plot Against America. HisMy Life as a Man still haunts me. In one sense Philip Roth is the culmination of the unsolved riddle of Jewish literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The complex influences ofKafka andFreud and the malaise of American Jewish life produced in Philip a new kind of synthesis.Pynchon aside, he must be estimated as the major American novelist sinceFaulkner."[103]
The New York Times asked several prominent authors to name their favorite work by Roth. The responses were varied;Jonathan Safran Foer chosePatrimony, Roth's memoir of his father's illness: "Much has been written about Roth since he died. In keeping with the unseemliness of our profession, we all have something to say. The responses have overflowed with a kind of blunt adoration that would be perfectly un-Rothlike if they weren't the efforts of children agonizing over the right way to bury our father. None of it feels right, perhaps because nothing could. Roth's words dressed his father for death, and they dressed so many of us for life. How does one properly acknowledge that? How does one say thank you for the thousand almost-invisible preparations? This morning, as I was getting my children dressed for school, I felt the profound gratitude of a 'little son.'"[104]
Joyce Carol Oates toldThe Guardian: "Philip Roth was a slightly older contemporary of mine. We had come of age in more or less the same repressive 50s era in America—formalist, ironic, 'Jamesian', a time of literary indirection and understatement, above all impersonality—as the high priestTS Eliot had preached: 'Poetry is an escape from personality.' Boldly, brilliantly, at times furiously, and with an unsparing sense of the ridiculous, Philip repudiated all that. He did revere Kafka—butLenny Bruce as well. (In fact, the essential Roth is just that anomaly: Kafka riotously interpreted by Lenny Bruce.) But there was much more to Philip than furious rebellion. For at heart he was a true moralist, fired to root out hypocrisy and mendacity in public life as well as private. Few sawThe Plot Against America as actual prophecy, but here we are. He will abide."[105]
^Roth, Philip. "The Day It Snowed." Chicago Review, vol. 8, no. 4, 1954, pp. 34–44. JSTOR25293074.
^Roth, Philip. "Mrs. Lindbergh, Mr. Ciardi, and the Teeth and Claws of the Civilized World." Chicago Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 1957, pp. 72–76. JSTOR25293349.
^Roth, Philip. "Positive Thinking on Pennsylvania Avenue." Chicago Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 1957, pp. 21–24. JSTOR25293295.
^Roth, Philip.The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography. New York, 1988. Roth discusses Martinson's portrait in this memoir. He calls her "Josie" inWhen She Was Good on pp. 149 and 175. He discusses her as an inspiration forMy 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 uponPortnoy's Complaint is seen inThe Facts as more diffuse, a kind of loosening-up for the author: "It took time and it took blood, and not, really, until I beganPortnoy's Complaint would I be able to cut loose with anything approaching her gift for flabbergasting boldness." (p. 149)
^The Wit and Blasphemy of Atheists: 500 Greatest Quips and Quotes from Freethinkers, Non-Believers and the Happily Damned. Ulysses Press. 2011. p. 190.ISBN978-1569759707.When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place. – Philip Roth
^Braver, Rita (October 3, 2010)."Philip Roth on Fame, Sex and God". CBS Interactive Inc. RetrievedMay 5, 2014.'Do you consider yourself a religious person?' 'No, I don't have a religious bone in my body,' Roth said. 'You don't?' 'No.' 'So, do you feel like there's a God out there?' Braver asked. 'I'm afraid there isn't, no,' Roth said. 'You know that telling the whole world that you don't believe in God is going to, you know, have people say, "Oh my goodness, you know, that's a terrible thing for him to say,"' Braver said. Roth replied, 'When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.'
^Krasnik, Martin (December 14, 2005)."Philip Roth: 'It no longer feels a great injustice that I have to die'".The Guardian. London.ISSN1756-3224.OCLC60623878.Archived from the original on November 8, 2014. RetrievedJune 20, 2025.I'm exactly the opposite of religious," he says. "I'm anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It's all a big lie." [...] "I have such a huge dislike. It's not a neurotic thing, but the miserable record of religion—I don't even want to talk about it. It's not interesting to talk about the sheep referred to as believers. When I write, I'm alone. It's filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety—and I never needed religion to save me.
^p. 5, Philip Roth,The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, Random House, 2011: "I'm talking about a breakdown. Although there's no need to delve into particulars ... what was to have been minor surgery ... led to an extreme depression that carried me right to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution. It was in the period of post-crack-up medication, with the clarity attending the remission of an illness ..."
^p. 79, Timothy Parrish (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, Cambridge University Press, 2007: "In point of fact, Roth's surgeries (one the knee surgery, which is followed by a nervous breakdown, the other heart surgery) span the period ..."
^pp. 108–09, Harold Bloom,Philip Roth, Infobase Publishing, 2003
^Philip Roth at 80: A Celebration: Remarks delivered on the occasion of Philip Roth's 80th birthday, The Library of America, New York, 2014. Contributors to the book are Jonathan Lethem, Hermione Lee, Alain Finkielkraut, Claudia Roth Pierpont, Edna O'Brien, and Philip Roth.
^SeeThe New York Times, Monday, September 30, 2013, p. C4. Congratulations Philip Roth on being named Commander of the Legion of Honor by the Republic of France. Vintage/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
^"Philip Roth Biography Finds a New Publisher",The New York Times, May 17, 2021[1]
^"Statement on the Possible Destruction of Essential Materials Pertaining to Philip Roth"[2]
^Alex Shephard, "Blake Bailey Had Exclusive Access to Philip Roth’s Personal Papers. Roth’s Estate Plans on Destroying Them."The New Republic, May 21, 2021[3]
^Copies ofNotes for My Biographer,Notes on a Slander-Monger, and other "typescripts and manuscripts" were "deeded" by Benjamin Taylor, to whom Roth had given them, "to the Manuscripts Division of Princeton's Firestone Library." Benjamin Taylor, "Even in His Retirement, Philip Roth Wrote Thousands of Pages",Literary Hub, May 19, 2020[4]. The text of this article was included in Benjamin Taylor,Here We Are: My Friendship With Philip Roth (Penguin Books, 2020).
^"What Happens to Philip Roth's Legacy Now?",The New York Times, June 4, 2021[5]
Saxton, Martha (1974)Philip Roth Talks about His Own WorkLiterary Guild June 1974, n.2. Also published in Philip Roth, George John Searles (1992)Conversations with Philip Roth p. 78
Kinzel, Till,Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens. Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie (American Studies Monograph Series). Heidelberg: Universitaetsverlag Winter, 2006.
Miceli, Barbara, 'Escape from the Corpus: The Pain of Writing and Illness in Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson' in Bootheina Majoul and Hanen Baroumi, The Poetics and Hermeuetics of Pain and Pleasure, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022: 55–62.
Milowitz, Steven,Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Morley, Catherine,The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Parrish, Timothy, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Pierpont, Claudia RothRoth Unbound: A Writer and His Books. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Podhoretz, Norman, "The Adventures of Philip Roth,"Commentary (October 1998), reprinted as "Philip Roth, Then and Now" inThe Norman Podhoretz Reader. New York: Free Press, 2004.
Posnock, Ross,Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Royal, Derek Parker,Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2005.
Safer, Elaine B.,Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture). Albany: SUNY Press, 2006.
Schmitt, Sebastian,Fifties Nostalgia in Selected Novels of Philip Roth (MOSAIC: Studien und Texte zur amerikanischen Kultur und Geschichte, Vol. 60). Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2017 (Open Access:https://www.wvt-online.com/media/9783868217407.pdf).
Searles, George J., ed.,Conversations With Philip Roth. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992.
Searles, George J.,The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Shostak, Debra B.,Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Swirski, Peter, "It Can't Happen Here, or Politics, Emotions, and Philip Roth'sThe Plot Against America."American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York, Routledge, 2011.
Taylor, Benjamin.Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth. New York: Penguin Random House, 2020.
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