Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth (1933 -2018) was an American writer, most known for American Pastoral, Sabbath's Theater, The Ghost Writer, and Portnoy's Complaint.
- The Complete Novels of Philip Roth (nine volumes)For the last half century, the novels of Philip Roth have re-energized American fiction and redefined its possibilities.
- Philip Roth: BritannicaPhilip Roth, in full Philip Milton Roth, (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.—died May 22, 2018, New York, New York), American novelist and short-story writer whose works are characterized by an acute ear for dialogue, a concern with Jewish middle-class life, and the painful entanglements of sexual and familial love.
- The Philip Roth SocietyThe Official Home of the Philip Roth Society and the journal, Philip Roth Studies.
Research & Reference
- Philip Roth: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference page on Philip Roth. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- Philip Roth PapersCorrespondence, drafts, galleys, notes, interviews, play scripts, clippings, photographs, and other papers documenting Roth's literary career. Includes working texts for his books including Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959); Portnoy's Complaint (1969); The Ghost Writer (1979); The Facts : A Novelist's Autobiography (1988); Patrimony : A True Story (1991); and American Pastoral (1997). Subjects include the writings of Roth and others, literary matters, social issues, personal affairs, the Jewish community in the U.S., Yaddo artists colony, and the Writers from the Other Europe series promoting and publishing writers from Central and Eastern Europe.
Author's Works & Perspectives
American Pastoral
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Here is Philip Roth's masterpiece--an elegy for the American century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager--a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, American Pastoral gives us Philip Roth at the height of his powers.
Sabbath's Theater
Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress--an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own--Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.
The Ghost Writer
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life. The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency--and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.
Operation Shylock
Time Magazine Best American Novel (1993) In this fiendishly imaginative book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator. With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a cast of characters that includes Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.