Philip Roth

I

Introduction

Philip Roth, born in 1933, American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, whose works reflect the problems of assimilation and identity among American Jews. Like Nobel Prize-winning writer Saul Bellow, who also interprets the Jewish American experience, Roth is a major figure in contemporary psychological realism. Yet he also borrows techniques from fantasy and the grotesque world of Czech novelist Franz Kafka, as in his surrealistic novel The Breast (1972), in which a man turns into a large female breast.

Much of Roth’s work explores the nature of sexual desire and self-understanding. The trademark of his fiction is the confessional monologue, told with a riotous humor and hysterical energy often associated with the hero and narrator of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the novel that brought him fame.

II

Roth’s Early Years

Born Philip Milton Roth in Newark, New Jersey, he received a B.A. degree from Bucknell University in 1954 and an M.A. degree from the University of Chicago in 1955. While working toward his Ph.D. degree (not completed), he taught English at the University of Chicago from 1956 to 1958. He later taught at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and at other universities. For his first published work, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a collection of stories, Roth won the 1960 National Book Award in fiction. The title story of the collection was made into a motion picture in 1969 (see Goodbye, Columbus).

Roth’s first novel, Letting Go (1962), explores the agony of a young Jewish professor torn between emotion and reason. When She Was Good (1967), a novel about a Protestant housewife set in a Midwestern town, marks a departure from his usual explorations of Jewish experience. Portnoy’s Complaint is devoted primarily to the sexual activities of its central character, Alexander Portnoy, and is delivered as a monologue by Portnoy from his psychiatrist’s couch. Its tormented narrator, guilt-ridden and sex-obsessed, is seen by Roth as the product and victim of an overly possessive Jewish mother. Portnoy’s mother is generally conceded to be one of the outstanding comic creations in modern fiction. The novel’s frank sexuality and its sarcastic treatment of Jewish life created a furor in literary circles, alienating some of Roth’s earliest admirers even as it established him as a novelist of power and originality.

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III

After Portnoy’s Complaint

In the years after Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s fiction took a darker turn, questioning not only the causes of personal unhappiness but also the psychoanalytic terms by which it is addressed in modern culture. The tortured Jewish intellectual turns up in many of his novels. In The Professor of Desire (1977), Roth traces the romantic adventures of the young professor, David Kepish, from The Breast. Kepish returns at age 70, still pursuing erotic adventure, in The Dying Animal (2001).

The character who appears most frequently in Roth’s novels is the writer Nathan Zuckerman, through whom Roth can explore the problems of the writer as well as the tragicomic aspects of Jewish assimilation in the United States. A number of critics have identified Zuckerman as Roth’s alter ego (alternative personality), and some of the fictional character’s experiences mirror the author’s own life. Zuckerman is the focus of The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983). His saga continues in The Counterlife (1986), and he appears in The Facts (1988), which is primarily about Roth’s own life.

Nathan Zuckerman returns to narrate American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000), and Exit Ghost (2007). American Pastoral, a story about the deterioration of a family and the American dream, won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I Married a Communist tells the story of a man whose wife turns against him in the period of anti-Communist fervor in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In The Human Stain an academic scandal reflects the political scandal that brought about U.S. president Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. The Human Stain was made into a motion picture starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman in 2003. An aging Zuckerman grapples with aging and loss following prostate surgery in Exit Ghost (2007).

Roth’s other works include The Great American Novel (1973), an allegory in which a baseball team stands for the United States; Patrimony (1991), a memoir about Roth’s dying father; and Sabbath’s Theater (1995), an erotic romp that won the 1995 National Book Award in fiction. Roth projects an alternate course for U.S. history in The Plot Against America (2004), which takes place in an imagined America where aviation hero Charles Lindbergh runs as Republican candidate for president in 1940 on a peace-with-Hitler platform and defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt. The novel Everyman (2006) reflects on aging and mortality in the wake of its protagonist’s dramatic surgery.

Despite the exuberance and exhibitionism of his fiction, Roth is an extremely private person. He lives in Connecticut and has a studio in New York City, where he writes. Roth’s first marriage to Margaret Martinson, in 1959, ended with her death in 1968, although the two had separated some years earlier. In 1990 Roth married British actress Claire Bloom. The marriage ended in divorce in 1994.

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