Philip Roth and I
A conversation with Philip Roth
The writer ruminates on God, his penchant for imagined hells, the
nature of imagination and the origins of his stories. His latest
novel, “Nemesis,” involves a polio epidemic in 1944 Newark.
Author Philip Roth, author of the book “Nemesis” published by Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. (Nancy Crampton / September 24, 2010)
By David L. Ulin
Los Angeles Times Book Critic
October 3, 2010
la-ca-philip-roth-20101003
Reporting from New York — Perhaps one of the keys to aging as a
writer, Philip Roth is saying, is how one engages with calamity.
Certainly, that’s an issue in his latest novel, “Nemesis” (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt: 280 pp., $26), which involves a polio epidemic in
the Jewish Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, N.J., in the summer of
1944. “I was making a list of subjects I had lived through that I’ve
never written about,” the author explains, sitting in a small
conference room at the Manhattan offices of his publisher, long
fingers steepled before him, voice smooth and understated as if worn
down a little bit by time. “There were quite a few, and when I thought
polio, I began to wonder how to treat it. I was born in 1933, so I
lived through the polio scare for many years.”
At 77, Roth has spent much of his career considering various menaces,
of both the individual and the collective sort. His 2004 novel “The
Plot Against America” posits an alternate history in which Charles
Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election, ushering in an oddly
nativist form of fascism; the American trilogy (“American Pastoral,”
“I Married a Communist,” “The Human Stain”) identifies a more elusive
danger: the strident sanctimony that, since at least the Red scare of
the 1950s, has been a dominant thread in the fabric of our public
life.
“Nemesis” has more than a little in common with such efforts, both
because of its Newark setting — Newark is to Roth what Dublin is to
Joyce, a landscape to which his imagination has consistently returned
since the publication of his first book, “Goodbye, Columbus,” in 1959
— and also because of the atmosphere of barely controlled panic, of
“vile accusation and intemperate hatred,” that runs throughout the
book. The story of Bucky Cantor, a 23-year-old playground director who
is forced to choose between the kids under his care and his devotion
to the young woman he wants to marry, becomes a nearly biblical
inquiry into conscience and responsibility, as well as the ongoing and
irresolvable conflict between humanity and God.
“Doesn’t God have a conscience?” Bucky wonders as he struggles to deal
with the sweep of the disease across his community. “Where’s His
responsibility?” The moment is reminiscent of the scene in “The Human
Stain” in which, as he confronts the “ceaseless perishing … [t]he
stupendous decimation that is death,” Roth’s alter ego, Nathan
Zuckerman, rages: “What an idea! What maniac conceived it?”
In Roth’s view, of course, this has everything to do with writing. “I
have no argument with God,” he says, “because I don’t believe in God.”
Nonetheless, it’s hard to read “Nemesis” without a sense of if not
theology then theodicy, the question of, as Roth puts it, “how God’s
goodness can exist in the face of all these catastrophes.” To Bucky,
this becomes the substance of a moral crisis; to Roth, it is yet
another iteration of the themes that mark his late novels, going back
to 2006′s “Everyman.”
These are dark books, concerned with tragic, even last things: the
death of the protagonist in “Everyman”; the series of “small,
ridiculous” mistakes that prove disastrous for the narrator of
“Indignation” (2008); the loss of acuity that afflicts the aging actor
at the center of “The Humbling” (2009). Taken together, they form a
suite of sorts — “Nemeses: Short Novels,” as Roth has taken to calling
them, “a sequence of thinking on my part about cataclysm.” Yet here
again, Roth raises a compelling set of distinctions, between the
writer and the character, between the author and his work. For all his
interest in collapse or ruination, he is refreshingly light-hearted
about it; at one point, he jokes, “I’m on a cataclysm kick.” And for
all that we may read the books as autobiographical — an older writer
putting his own concerns or worries into his fiction — Roth is adamant
that what he’s about is, as it has always been, the art of
storytelling, that to read him otherwise is to misunderstand the way
literature works.
That’s a complicated argument, considering that so many of Roth’s
books have appropriated the substance of his life as a starting point.
It’s not just Newark, where he was born and raised, but also his
struggle with Jewish middle-class conformity, as well as his
fascination with a certain unfettered sexuality, as embodied in novels
such as “Sabbath’s Theater” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.” The latter
book, in particular — a rabid confession from the psychotherapist’s
couch that made Roth a superstar when it appeared in 1969 — has long
been regarded as a thinly veiled personal statement, an illusion Roth
encouraged when he created Zuckerman, a writer who becomes infamous
for a novel, “Carnovsky,” which has something of the same effect.
And yet, if Roth is willing to acknowledge the connection, he is
insistent that such readings “fail to understand the nature of
imagination, which is what the writer has. People think that when a
character is angry, the writer is angry. But it’s not as simple as
that. The writer is delighted to have found the character’s anger. Or
his obstinacy. Or his unpredictability. It isn’t that I’m
unpredictable and obstinate. I’m just delighted that he is.”
Perhaps the most useful way to think about it, Roth continues, is as a
performance, in which he requires certain details, certain props, with
which to work. One element feeds another, until the story reveals
itself. “I don’t know very much,” he says about how he begins a novel.
“I write my way into my knowledge. Then, if I’m lucky, I get a break.
That’s why it’s so important to get started. Because however awful
starting is — and it is absolutely awful — when you get into it, when
you’ve got 10 pages, which may take two weeks, then you can begin to
build.” In the case of “Nemesis,” it was Bucky’s girlfriend who
provided the breakthrough, with her desire to keep him safe. At other
times, one novel has functioned as the fulcrum for another, shifting
his entire body of work. This is what happened with “The Ghost
Writer” (1979) and “The Counterlife” (1986), both of which represent
significant turning points. “‘The Counterlife’ especially,” Roth
recalls, “jettisoned me into ‘Operation Shylock’ and ‘Sabbath’s
Theater,’ and then I was cooking on all burners and stuff was just
coming out of me.”
By his own admission, Roth isn’t writing like that anymore; as he
says, “I don’t have that kind of energy now.” Yet with “Nemesis,” as
with “Everyman” and “Indignation” before it, he is talking through
himself to himself, across the arc of his career. Among the most
striking aspects of the novel is how much it reflects books such as
“Goodbye, Columbus” and “The Plot Against America,” in not just
narrative but theme too. Like the former, it involves a working-class
boy in love with both an upper-middle-class girl and the seeming
safety of her family. Like the latter, it evokes a fictional disaster
— there was no polio epidemic in Newark in 1944, any more than there
was a Lindbergh presidency — as a cautionary measurement, an
expression of how fortunate we were.
“I don’t know what causes me to want to imagine some hell that didn’t
happen,” Roth says, his voice quietly expressive, “but I think in a
way it’s a tribute to our luck.” As for the echoes, he suggests: “It’s
bound to happen, because things will come back disguised or in new
forms. You only have your dozen love letters to write, you know?”
***@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times
Philip Roth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the author. For the cellist, see Philipp Roth.
Philip Roth
Born Philip Milton Roth
March 19, 1933 (1933-03-19) (age 77)
Newark, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation Novelist
Nationality American
Period 1959–present
Genres Literary fiction
Influences
Henry James, Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Milan Kundera,
Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Ernest Hemingway, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Bernard Malamud,
Nikolai Gogol, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Primo Levi, John Updike,
Albert Camus
Influenced
Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen
Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933)[1] is an American novelist.
He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent
and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a
National Book Award,[2] and became a major celebrity with the
publication, in 1969, of the storm-provoking Portnoy’s Complaint, the
humorous psychoanalytical monologue of “a lust-ridden, mother-addicted
young Jewish bachelor,” filled with “intimate, shameful detail, and
coarse, abusive language.”[2][3]
Roth has since become one of the most honored authors of his
generation: his books have twice been awarded the National Book Award,
twice 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 his best known character, Nathan
Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth’s novels. His 2001 novel
The Human Stain, another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United
Kingdom’s WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. His
fiction, set frequently in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its
intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally
blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its “supple,
ingenious style,” and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and
American identity.[4]
Life
Philip Roth grew up in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New
Jersey, as the second child of first-generation American parents, Jews
of Galician descent, and graduated from Newark’s Weequahic High School
in 1950.[5] Roth attended Bucknell University, earning a degree in
English. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of
Chicago, where he received an M.A. in English literature and worked
briefly as an instructor in the university’s writing program. Roth
then taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton
University. He continued his academic career at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature before retiring
from teaching in 1991.
While at Chicago, Roth met the novelist Saul Bellow, as well as
Margaret Martinson, who became his first wife. Their separation in
1963, along with Martinson’s death in a car crash in 1968, left a
lasting mark on Roth’s literary output. Specifically, Martinson was
the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth’s novels,
including Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good, and Maureen Tarnopol in My
Life As a Man.[6] Between the end of his studies and the publication
of his first book in 1959, Roth served two years in the United States
Army and then wrote short fiction and criticism for various magazines,
including movie reviews for The New Republic. Events in Roth’s
personal life have occasionally been the subject of media scrutiny.
According to his pseudo-confessional novel Operation Shylock (1993),
Roth suffered a nervous breakdown in the late 1980s. In 1990, he
married his long-time companion, 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 which
was unflattering to Roth. Certain aspects of I Married a Communist
have been regarded by critics as veiled rebuttals to accusations put
forth in Bloom’s memoir.
Career
Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five short
stories, won the National Book Award in 1960, and afterwards he
published two novels, Letting Go and When She Was Good. However, it
was not until the publication of his third novel, Portnoy’s Complaint,
in 1969 that Roth enjoyed widespread commercial and critical success.
During the 1970s Roth experimented in various modes, from the
political satire Our Gang to the Kafkaesque The Breast. 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) has perhaps Roth’s most lecherous
protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced former puppeteer. In complete
contrast, the first volume of Roth’s second Zuckerman trilogy, 1997′s
American Pastoral, focuses on the life of virtuous Newark athletics
star Swede Levov and the tragedy that befalls him when his teenage
daughter transforms into a domestic terrorist during the late 1960s. 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. In The Plot Against America (2004), Roth
imagines an alternate 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. For Everyman Roth won his third PEN/
Faulkner Award, making him the only person so honored. Exit Ghost,
which again features Nathan Zuckerman, was released in October 2007.
According to the book’s publisher, it is the last Zuckerman novel.[7]
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,
which told the story of the last performances of Simon Axler, a
celebrated stage actor. The announced title of Roth’s 31st book is
Nemesis.
In October 2009, during an interview with Tina Brown of The Daily
Beast website 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[.][8]
When asked his opinion on the emergence of digital books and e-books
as possibly replacing printed copy, Roth was equally as negative and
downbeat about the prospect:
The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the]
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.[9]
This interview is not the first time that Roth has expressed pessimism
over the future of the novel and its significance in recent years.
Talking to the Observer’s Robert McCrum in 2001, he said that “I’m not
good at finding ‘encouraging’ features in American culture. I doubt
that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.”[8]
Influences and themes
Much of Roth’s fiction revolves around semi-autobiographical themes,
while self-consciously and playfully addressing the perils of
establishing connections between the author Philip Roth and his
fictional lives and voices,[citation needed] including narrators and
protagonists such as David Kepesh and Nathan Zuckerman or even the
character “Philip Roth”, of which there are two in Operation Shylock.
In Roth’s fiction, the question of authorship[citation needed] is
intertwined with the theme of the idealistic,[citation needed] secular
Jewish-American son who attempts to distance himself from Jewish
customs and traditions, and from what he perceives as the at times
suffocating influence of parents, rabbis, and other community leaders.
Jewish sons such as most infamously Alexander Portnoy and later Nathan
Zuckerman rebel by denouncing Judaism, while at the same time
remaining attached to a sense of Jewish identity.[citation needed]
Roth’s fiction has been described by critics as pervaded by “a kind of
alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it”.[10]
Roth’s first work, Goodbye, Columbus, for his irreverent humor of the
life of middle-class Jewish Americans, was controversial among
reviewers, which were highly polarized in their judgments;[2] a
reviewer criticized it as infused with a sense of self-loathing. In
response, Roth, in his 1963 essay “Writing About Jews” (collected in
Reading 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:
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.[11]
In Roth’s fiction, the exploration of “promiscuous instincts” within
the context of Jewish-American lives, mainly from a male viewpoint,
plays an important role. In the words of critic Hermione Lee:
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.
[12]
While Roth’s fiction has strong autobiographical influences, it has
also incorporated social commentary and political satire, most
obviously in Our Gang and Operation Shylock. Since the 1990s, Roth’s
fiction has often combined autobiographical elements with
retrospective dramatizations of postwar American life. Roth has
described American Pastoral and the two following novels as a loosely
connected “American trilogy”. All these novels deal with aspects of
the postwar era against the backdrop of the nostalgically remembered
Jewish-American childhood of Nathan Zuckerman, in which the experience
of life on the American home front during the Second World War
features prominently.[citation needed]
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 more comic novels, such
as Portnoy’s Complaint and Sabbath’s Theater. In The Plot Against
America, the alternate history of the war years dramatizes the
prevalence of anti-Semitism and racism in America during the war
years, despite the promotion of increasingly influential anti-racist
ideals in wartime. Nonetheless, the 1940s, and the New Deal era of the
1930s that preceded it, are portrayed in much of Roth’s recent fiction
as a heroic phase in American history. A sense of frustration with
social and political developments in the US since the 1940s is
palpable in the American trilogy and Exit Ghost, but had already been
present in Roth’s earlier works that contained political and social
satire, such as Our Gang and The Great American Novel. Writing about
the latter novel, Hermione Lee points to the sense 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’.”[12]
Awards and honors
Two of Roth’s works of fiction have won the National Book Award; two
others were finalists. Two have won National Book Critics Circle
awards; again, another two were finalists. He has also won three PEN/
Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and
a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral. In
2001, The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom’s WH Smith
Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2002, he was awarded
the National Book Foundation’s Award for Distinguished Contribution to
American Letters. 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.[13] His 2004 novel The Plot
Against America won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005
as well as the Society of American Historians’ James Fenimore Cooper
Prize for Best Historical Fiction. Roth was also awarded the United
Kingdom’s WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, an
award Roth has received twice.[14] He was honored in his hometown in
October 2005 when then-mayor Sharpe 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 in The Plot Against America. A plaque on the house where the
Roths lived was also unveiled. 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.[15]
The May 21, 2006 issue of The 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 please identify ‘the single best work
of American fiction published in the last 25 years.’” Six of Roth’s
novels were in the 22 selected: American Pastoral, The Counterlife,
Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater, The Human Stain, and The Plot
Against America.[16] The accompanying essay, written by critic A.O.
Scott, stated, “If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction
of the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won.”[17]
Films
Four of Philip Roth’s novels and short stories have been made into
films: Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy’s Complaint; The Human Stain; and
The Dying Animal which was made into the movie Elegy.
Bibliography
Main article: Bibliography of Philip Roth
Zuckerman novels
•The Ghost Writer (1979)
•Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
•The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
•The Prague Orgy (1985)
(The above four books are collected as Zuckerman Bound)
•The Counterlife (1986)
•American Pastoral (1997)
•I Married a Communist (1998)
•The Human Stain (2000)
•Exit Ghost (2007)
[edit] Roth novels
•Deception: A Novel (1990)
•Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)
•The Plot Against America (2004)
[edit] Kepesh novels
•The Breast (1972)
•The Professor of Desire (1977)
•The Dying Animal (2001)
[edit] Other novels
•Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
•Letting Go (1962)
•When She Was Good (1967)
•Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
•Our Gang (1971)
•The Great American Novel (1973)
•My Life As a Man (1974)
•Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
•Everyman (2006)
•Indignation (2008)
•The Humbling (2009)
•Nemesis (2010)
Nonfiction
•The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988)
•Patrimony: A True Story (1991)
Collections
•Reading Myself and Others (1976)
•A Philip Roth Reader (1980, revised edition 1993)
•Shop Talk (2001)
Library of America Editions
Main article: The Library of America’s definitive edition of Philip
Roth’s collected works
Edited by Ross Miller
•Novels and Stories 1959-1962 (2005) ISBN 978-1-93108279-2
•Novels 1967-1972 (2005) ISBN 978-1-93108280-8
•Novels 1973-1977 (2006) ISBN 978-1-93108296-9
•Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985 (2007) ISBN
978-1-59853-011-7
•Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (2008) ISBN 978-1-59853-030-8
•Novels 1993–1995 (2010) ISBN 978-1-59853-078-0
[edit] List of awards
•1960 National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus
•1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife
•1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony
•1994 PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock
•1995 National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater
•1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for American Pastoral
•1998 Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I
Married a Communist
•1998 National Medal of Arts
•2000 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France) for American Pastoral
•2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for The Human Stain
•2001 Gold Medal In Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and
Letters
•2001 WH Smith Literary Award for The Human Stain
•2002 National Book Foundation‘s Award for Distinguished Contribution
to American Letters
•2002 Prix Médicis Étranger (France) for The Human Stain
•2003 Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Harvard University
•2005 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for The Plot Against
America
•2005 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction for The
Plot Against America
•2006 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement
•2007 PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman
•2007 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
•2010 Paris Review’s Hadada Prize
Notes
1.^ Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of American Writers. 2001. p. 350.
ISBN 9780877790228.
2.^ a b c Brauner (2005), pp.43-7
3.^ Saxton (1974)
4.^ U.S. Department of State, U.S. Life, “American Prose, 1945-1990:
Realism and Experimentation”
5.^ Lubasch, Arnold H. “Philip Roth Shakes Weequahic High”, The New
York Times, February 28, 1969. Accessed September 8, 2007. “It has
provided the focus for the fiction of Philip Roth, the novelist who
evokes his era at Weequahic High School in the highly acclaimed
Portnoy’s Complaint.… Besides identifying Weequahic High School by
name, the novel specifies such sites as the Empire Burlesque, the
Weequahic Diner, the Newark 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.”
6.^ Roth, Philip. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. New York,
1988. Roth discusses Martinson’s portrait in this memoir. He calls her
“Josie” in When She Was Good on pp. 149 and 175. He discusses her as
an inspiration for My 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 upon Portnoy’s Complaint is seen in The
Facts as more diffuse, a kind of loosening-up for the author: “It took
time and it took blood, and not, really, until I began Portnoy’s
Complaint would I be able to cut loose with anything approaching her
gift for flabbergasting boldness.” (p. 149)
7.^ “Zuckerman’s Last Hurrah.” New York Times. November 30, 2006.
8.^ a b Flood, Alison (26 October 2009). “Philip Roth predicts novel
will be minority cult within 25 years”. The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/26/philip-roth-novel-minority-cult.
9.^ Brown, Tina (October 21, 2009). “Philip Roth Unbound: The Full
Interview”. The Daily Beast.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-21/philip-roth-unbound-the-full-interview.
Retrieved March 2, 2010.
10.^ Greenberg (1997), p.11
11.^ Roth, Philip (December 1963). “Writing About Jews”. Commentary.
12.^ a b Lee, Hermione (1982). Philip Roth. New York: Methuen & Co.,
1982.
13.^ Bloom, Harold. “Dumbing down American readers”. The Boston Globe.
September 24, 2003.
14.^ WH Smith Award
15.^ PEN American Center. “Philip Roth Wins Inaugural PEN/Saul Bellow
Award”. April 2, 2007.
16.^ The New York Times Book Review. “What Is the Best Work of
American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?”. May 21, 2006.
17.^ Scott, A.O. “In Search of the Best”. The New York Times. May 21,
2006.
References
•Brauner, David (1969) Getting in Your Retaliation First: Narrative
Strategies in Portnoy’s Complaint in Royal, Derek Parker (2005) Philip
Roth: new perspectives on an American author, chapter 3
•Greenberg, Robert (Winter 1997). “Trangression in the Fiction of
Philip Roth”. Twentieth Century Literature (Hofstra University) 43
(4): 487. doi:10.2307/441747. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n4_v43/ai_20614549.
•Saxton, Martha (1974) Philip Roth Talks about His Own Work Literary
Guild June 1974, n.2. Also published in in Philip Roth, George John
Searles (1992) Conversations with Philip Roth p. 78
[edit] Further reading and literary criticism
•Bloom, Harold and Welsch, Gabe, eds., Modern Critical Interpretations
of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Chelsea House, 2003.
•Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views of Philip Roth, Chelsea
House, New York, 2003.
•Cooper, Alan, Philip Roth and the Jews (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish
Literature and Culture), SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 1996.
•Kinzel, Till, Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens.
Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie
(American Studies Monograph Series), Heidelberg: Winter, 2006.
•Milowitz, Steven, Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary
Universe of the American Writer, Routledge, New York, 2000.
•Morley, Catherine, The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American
Literature, Routledge, New York, 2008.
•Parrish, Timothy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.
•Podhoretz, Norman, “The Adventures of Philip Roth,” Commentary
(October 1998), reprinted as “Philip Roth, Then and Now” in The Norman
Podhoretz Reader, 2004.
•Posnock, Ross, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2006.
•Royal, Derek Parker, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American
Author, Praeger Publishers, Santa Barbara, CA, 2005.
•Safer, Elaine B., Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth
(SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture), SUNY Press,
Albany, NY, 2006.
•Searles, George J., ed., Conversations With Philip Roth, University
of Mississippi Press, Jackson, Mississippi, 1992.
•Searles, George J., The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike,
Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1984.
•Shostak, Debra B., Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives,
University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 2004.
•Simic, Charles, “The Nicest Boy in the World,” The New York Review of
Books, Vol. LV, No. 15, 9 October 2008.
•Wöltje, Wiebke-Maria, My finger on the pulse of the nation.
Intellektuelle Protagonisten im Romanwerk Philip Roths (Mosaic, 26),
Trier: WVT, 2006.
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Philip Roth
Informational
•Literary Encyclopedia biography
•The Philip Roth Society
•Philip Roth looks back on a legendary career, and forward to his
final act
•Works by Philip Roth on Open Library at the Internet Archive
Interviews
•Roth interview – from NPR‘s “Fresh Air“, September 2005
•Roth interview – from The Guardian, December 2005
•Roth interview – from Open Source
•Roth interview – from Der Spiegel, February 2008
•Roth interview – from the London Times, October 17, 2009
•Roth interview – from CBC‘s Writers and Company. Aired 2009-11-01
v • d • e
Works by Philip Roth
Fiction Goodbye, Columbus · Letting Go · When She Was Good ·
Portnoy’s Complaint · Our Gang · The Great American Novel · My Life As
a Man · Sabbath’s Theater · Everyman · Indignation · The Humbling ·
Nemesis
Kepesh Novels The Breast · The Professor of Desire · The Dying Animal
Zuckerman Novels The Ghost Writer · Zuckerman Unbound · The Anatomy
Lesson · The Prague Orgy · The Counterlife · American Pastoral · I
Married a Communist · The Human Stain · Exit Ghost
Roth Novels Deception · Operation Shylock · The Plot Against America
Short Stories “The Conversion of the Jews” · “Defender of the Faith” ·
“The Kind of Person I am” · “Epstein” · “You Can’t Tell a Man by the
Song He Sings” · “Eli, the Fanatic” · “Philosophy, or Something Like
That” · “The Box of Truths” · “The Fence” · “Armando and the Frauds” ·
“The Final Delivery of Mr. Thorn” · “The Day It Snowed” · “The Contest
for Aaron Gold” · “Heard Melodies Are Sweeter” · “Expect the Vandals”
· “The Love Vessel” · “The Good Girl” · “The Mistaken” · “Novotny’s
Pain” · “Psychoanalytic Special” · “An Actor’s Life for Me” · “On the
Air” · “His Mistress’s Voice” · “Smart Money” · “The Ultimatum” ·
“Drenka’s Men” · “Communist”
Collections Zuckerman Bound · A Philip Roth Reader · Library of
America series
Non-fiction Memoirs The Facts · Patrimony
On Writing Reading Myself and Others · Shop Talk
Adaptations Films Goodbye, Columbus · Portnoy’s Complaint · The Human
Stain · Elegy
Philip Roth bibliography
Persondata
NAME Roth, Philip
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roth, Philip Milton (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION Novelist
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Newark, New Jersey, United States
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Roth“
Categories: 1933 births | Living people | American novelists |
American short story writers | American atheists | Jewish atheists |
Bucknell University alumni | Jewish American writers | Jewish
novelists | Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters |
United States National Medal of Arts recipients | People from Newark,
New Jersey | National Book Award winners | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
winners | Sidewise Award winning authors | University of Chicago
alumni | University of Iowa faculty | Princeton University faculty |
University of Pennsylvania faculty | Writers from New Jersey | Iowa
Writers’ Workshop faculty | American Jews | Galician Jews | Guggenheim
Fellows | Jewish American military personnel | Prix Médicis étranger
winners
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…and I am Sid Harth
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