Philip Roth

Author

• Born: March 19, 1933
• Birthplace: Newark, New Jersey
• Died: May 22, 2018
• Place of death: New York, New York

Roth produced novels and short stories dealing with Jewish Americans and with ethnicity in America.

Early Life

The son of Hermann Roth and Bess Finkel Roth, Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in the lower-middle-class area called Weequahic, a district of Newark that was at the time of his youth predominantly Jewish. He attended Weequahic High School and then spent a year at Newark College of Rutgers University, after which he went to Bucknell University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1954. At Bucknell, Roth helped found the literary magazine Et Cetera, which also published his first short stories. While still an undergraduate, he published a short story, “The Day It Snowed,” in the Chicago Review. He then did graduate work in English at the University of Chicago, earning a master’s degree. In 1955, he enlisted in the United States Army but was discharged honorably several months later after receiving a spinal injury in basic training. He studied for a PhD at the University of Chicago and worked as an instructor there. In addition, Roth also taught at the University of Iowa (1960), Princeton University (as writer-in-residence, 1962), and the University of Pennsylvania (on and off from 1965 to 1975).

In 1955, Roth published “The Contest for Aaron Gold” in Epoch, which was chosen for inclusion in Martha Foley’s Best Short Stories of 1956. In 1959, he published Goodbye, Columbus, which, in 1960, won the National Book Award and the Daroff Award, thus launching his career as an important American author. In 1959, he married Margaret Martinson Williams, from whom he separated in 1963. Their tumultuous marriage figures prominently in many of Roth’s works of fiction and in The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988).

Life’s Work

In 1962, Roth appeared at Yeshiva University in New York on a panel on minority writers. Also on the panel were Ralph Ellison, an African American novelist, and Pietro di Donato, an Italian American novelist. Here, many of the criticisms of Roth’s works came to a head. Most of the questions from the audience were attacks on Roth, who was accused of being a self-hating Jew whose works did more harm than good to the Jewish people in America. The general tenor of the attacks followed that of earlier attacks: Had he written in Yiddish or at least published in a Jewish publication, his stories would not have done so much harm. However, because he was published in a general publication such as the New Yorker and in books available to all readers, Roth was accused of doing harm to the Jewish people. Ellison defended Roth, claiming that an author cannot be bound to saying what any particular group wants to hear. Roth based the rest of his writing life largely on the idea of telling the truth, as he saw it, even though it was couched in fiction and even though it might have upset some people. Portnoy's Complaint (1969), for example, caused a great deal of controversy among critics and the public alike when it was published. The book was banned in Australia and many US libraries refused to carry the book on their shelves.

Roth followed an idea in American writing that goes as far back as Nathaniel Hawthorne: that facts must often be changed to get at the truth. Thus, his writing about American Jews treated them as Roth felt they were, with their weaknesses and strengths, rather than as the world might have liked them to be. Even in The Facts, Roth uses many of the techniques of a fiction writer, including a preface in which Roth writes to one of his fictional creations, Nathan Zuckerman, whom Roth used as central character, narrator, and supposed author of several of his works, and an afterword in which Zuckerman criticizes the autobiography, even calling into question its factuality, and advises Roth not to publish it.

Many of the works Roth’s critics consider his most important involve Zuckerman, beginning with The Ghost Writer (1979), a work in which Zuckerman visits his hero, the writer E. I. Lonoff, and imagines an affair between Lonoff and Anne Frank, the diarist who was killed during the Holocaust. Other Zuckerman novels considered important include Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and Zuckerman Bound (1985), a work that includes The Ghost Writer and The Anatomy Lesson, along with an epilogue entitled “The Prague Orgy,” which involves an explicit tribute to Franz Kafka, the Czech Jewish writer who is one of Roth’s main sources. These continue with The Counterlife (1986); Roth’s American trilogy, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000); and Exit Ghost (2007), a continuation of The Ghost Writer, in which Zuckerman makes what appears to be his final appearance in Roth’s work.

Over the course of the next three years, Roth published three more novels, none of which included Nathan Zuckerman: Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009), and Nemesis (2010). After writing Nemesis, Roth decided to stop writing, and he officially announced his retirement as a writer in 2012, though he still wrote nonfiction. In 2017, the Library of America published the tenth volume of his definitive collected works, Philip Roth: Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013, which Roth had helped to edit. As of 2018, seven of Roth’s novels and short works have been adapted into motion pictures: Goodbye, Columbus (1969), Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), The Human Stain (2003), The Dying Animal (released as the film Elegy in 2008), The Humbling (2014), Indignation (2016), and American Pastoral (2016).

Roth died of congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018, in Manhattan. He was eighty-five years old. He was predeceased by his estranged first wife, Margaret Martinson Williams, who died in 1968. His second marriage, to actor Claire Bloom in 1990, ended in divorce in 1994.

Significance

Roth’s many honors testify to his importance as a writer. He won awards for several of his individual novels, including two National Book Awards (for 1959’s Goodbye, Columbus and 1995’s Sabbath’s Theater), two National Book Critics Circle Awards(for The Counterlife, and 1991’s Patrimony), three PEN/Faulkner awards (for 1993’s Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and 2006’s Everyman), and a Pulitzer Prize (for American Pastoral). He also won awards for the body of his work, including an award for Jewish Cultural Achievement in the Arts (1993), the gold medal for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001), the National Book Foundation award for distinguished contribution to American letters (2002), the PEN/Nabokov award for lifetime achievement (2006), the PEN/Bellow award for Achievement in American Fiction (2007), and the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction (2011). In 2003, he received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard University. In 2005, he became the third living author to have his works included in the Library of America. In 2010, Roth was presented with the National Humanities Medal by US president Barack Obama.

Bibliography

“At 80, Philip Roth Reflects on Life, Literature, and the Beauty of Naps.” NPR. National Public Radio, 23 Mar. 2013. Web. 27 Dec. 2014.

Halio, Jay. Philip Roth Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print.

McGrath, Charles. “Philip Roth, Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85.” The New York Times, 22 May 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/obituaries/philip-roth-dead.html. Accessed 9 July 2018.

Parrish, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Posnock, Ross. Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print.

Roth, Philip. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988. Print.

Roth, Philip. “An Open Letter to Wikipedia.” New Yorker. Condé Nast, 6 Sept. 2012. Web. 27 Dec. 2014.

Roth, Philip. Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.

Royal, Derek Parker, ed. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Print.

Schechner, Mark. Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Print.

Thurman, Judith. “Philip Roth Is Good for the Jews.” New Yorker. Condé Nast, 28 May 2014. Web. 27 Dec. 2014.