A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey) is a famous American novelist. His writings, noted for their irony and themes of identity, rebellion, and sexuality, deal largely with middle-class Jewish-American life. He gained early literary fame for the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus for which he won the prestigious National Book Award in 1960; grabbed headlines with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint and has continued to write noted literary works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels started with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and include the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997). Goodbye, Columbus (1959), for which he won the National Book Award when he was only 26 and which was later made into a film. It is the story of a poor young Jewish man from Newark, Rutgers, who has an affair with a wealthy young Jewish woman from the nearby New Jersey suburbs. The romance ends because of their differences in values. Roth grew up in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, as the second child of first-generation American parents, Jews of Galician descent, who graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in 1950. Roth went on to attend Bucknell University, where he earned a degree in English. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received an M.A. in English literature and then worked briefly as an instructor in the university's writing program. Roth went on to teach creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. He continued his teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania where he autorbusght comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1992. During his Chicago stay, Roth met the novelist Saul Bellow, as well as Margaret Martinson, who eventually became his first wife. Though the two separated in 1963, and Martinson died in a car crash in 1968, Roth's dysfunctional marriage to her left an important mark on his literary output. Specifically, Martinson was the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth's novels, including Maureen Tarnopol in My Life As a Man, and, most likely, Mary Jane Reed (aka "The Monkey") in Portnoy's Complaint. Jewishness has been Roth's major territory in his examination of the American culture. From Malamud and Bellow, his older colleagues, Roth has differed in a more ironic - sometimes characterized as "less loving" - view of the lives of the Jews. In Portnoy's Complaint a psychiatrist-couch monologue by a young, insecure, and hilariously articulate Jewish man who describes his life, notably his possessive mother, his erotic fascination with blonde Gentile girls, and his masturbatory exploits. It has been widely acclaimed a comic masterpiece. During the 1970s Roth experimented in various modes, from the political satire Our Gang to the Kafkaesque fantasy The Breast. Roth used his experiences in growing up in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, and his days as a college student in Rutgers and Bucknell as material for many of his works. He also employed his own writings and the public, and critical reaction to them, as the focus of much of his later material. For example, in two of his novels, Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), Roth expended thousands of words on the question of whether the novel he may be best known for, Portnoy's Complaint (1969), could be considered anti-Semitic. He introduced Franz Kafka as a character in his essay-story Looking at Kafka, in which he had the Czech writer coming to Newark to be his Hebrew teacher at the age of nine. In Professor of Desire (1977) Roth's character David Kepesh journeys to Prague to visit Kafka's home and discuss him with a Czech professor who is devoted to Melville. Henry James' Portrait of a Lady becomes a point at issue with the hero of Letitbusng Go (1962) and the woman he is involved with, and The Breast (1972) concerns the overnight change of a professor of literature into a six-foot mammary gland, recalling Gogol's The Nose and Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Many of the characters in his novels suggest Roth himself. In My Life As a Man (1970), which some critics hold as one of his best works, he depicts a novelist, Peter Tarnopol, recounting the sexual adventures of his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who will return as the author of Carnovsky, a sensational best-seller about sexual liberation that seems like Portnoy's Complaint. After many years of teaching comparative literature -- mostly at the University of Pennsylvania -- Philip Roth retired from teaching as a Distinguished Professor of Literature at Hunter College in 1992. Until 1989, he was General Editor of the Penguin book series "Writers from the Other Europe," which he inaugurated in 1974 and which introduced the work of Bruno Schulz and Milan Kundera to an American audience. Since 1970 he has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the 1990s, Philip Roth published some major works: Patrimony: a Memoir (1991), a story about his 86-year-old father's struggle with an incurable brain tumor, received the National Book Critics Circle Award; Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), winner of the 1994 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction and Time magazine's Best American Novel award; Sabbath's Theater (1995), National Book Award for Fiction; and American Pastoral (1997), an account of the effect that the Vietnam War had on the family of Seymour (Swede) Levov, a high school hero of the fictional Zuckerman and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1998. He continued using Zuckerman as an alter ego in I Married a Communist (1998), the story of Ira Ringold in post-World War II America. In 2000, Roth published The Human Stain, the third novel of a trilogy including American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, relates the story of a married professor in a New England college town who is forced from his job by accusations of racist comments. He subsequently begins an affair with the college's janitor. The Dying Animal (2001) relates the further adventures of David Kepesh, who had previously appeared in The Breast and The Professor of Desire. Now divorced, white-haired, and a senior citizen, Kapeck finds his life in disarray after he falls in love with a Cuban student. Also in 2001, Roth published Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, a collection of conversations that Roth has had with contemporary writers from around the world. Events in Roth's personal life have occasionally been the subject of media scrutiny. According to his pseudo-confessional novel Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), Roth suffered a nervous breakdown in the late 1980s. In this book, Roth meets a doppelganger, the other Philip Roth, a man, who claims to be the author. A true incident inspired Roth: the novelist Richard Elman had recalled in his book his seduction of a beautiful actress and his upset the next morning when he learns that she thought he was Philip Roth. Elman allowed her to leave unenlightened. Another subject in the book was John Demjanjuk's trial - the man alleged to be Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. Demjanjuk claimed that he had had a doppelganger, who had committed all the crimes he was accused of and murdered Jews in concentration camps. In 1990, he married his long-time companion - their relationship had already started in the 1970s-, English actress Claire Bloom. In 1994 they separated, and in 1996 Bloom published a memoir, Leaving a Doll's House, which described the couple's marriage in detail. Much of it was unflattering to Roth. Sometimes Roth views his own life as a part of his fiction. In The Plot Against America (2004), an alternate history, in which the famous pilot Charles Lindbergh is the 33rd President of the fascist U.S., Philip Roth is one of the characters, suffering from his Jewish background. Roth's 182-page novel Everyman, a meditation on illness, desire, and death, was published in May 2006. Roth's latest book, Exit Ghost, features the Zuckerman character and was released in October, 2007. According to the book's publisher, it will be the last Zuckerman novel. In this book Roth has explored the relationship between a fictional character and its creator, or the process of aging. Philip Roth is arguably the most celebrated American writer of his era and literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy. In May 2006, he was given the PEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007 he was awarded the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, making him the award's only three-time winner. In April 2007, he was chosen as the recipient of the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. His work has been acclaimed around the world, and in 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Philip Roth resides now in Connecticut. |
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