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.