Philip Milton Roth

Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, the son of American-born parents and the grandson of European Jews who were part of the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to the United States. He grew up in the city's lower-middle-class section of Weequahic and was educated in Newark public schools. He later attended Bucknell University, where he received his B.A., and the University of Chicago, where he completed his M. A. and taught English. Afterwards, at both Iowa and Princeton, he

taught creative writing, and for many years he taught comparative

literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from

teaching in 1992.

His first book was Goodbye, Columbus (1959), a novella and five

stories that use wit, irony, and humor to depict Jewish life in

post-war America. The book won him critical recognition, including

the National Book Award for fiction, and along with that,

condemnation from some within the Jewish community for

depicting what they saw as the unflattering side of cotemporary Jewish American experience. His first full-length novel was Letting Go (1962), a Jamesian realistic work that explores many of the societal and ethical issues of the 1950s. This was followed in 1967 by When She Was Good, another novel in the realistic mode that takes as its focus a rare narrative voice in Roth's fiction: a young Midwestern female.

He is perhaps best known--notoriously so, to many--for his third novel, Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a wildly comic representation of his middle-class New York Jewish world in the portrait of Alexander Portnoy, whose possessive mother makes him so

guilty and insecure that he can seek relief only in elaborate masturbation and sex with forbidden shiksas. For readers of that hilarious novel, eating liver would never be the same (read the book and you'll understand).Portnoy's Complaint was not only the New York Time's best seller for the year 1969, it also made a celebrity out of Roth. . . an uncomfortable position that he would later fictionalize in such novels as Zuckerman Unbound(1981) and Operation Shylock (1993). Following the publication of Portnoy Complaint, Roth experimented with different comic modes, at times outrageous,as

illustrated in the works Our Gang (1971), a parodic attack

on Richard Nixon; The Breast(1972), a Kafkaesque

rendering of sexual desire; The Great American Novel

(1973), a wild satire of both Frank Norris's novelistic quest

and the great American pastime, baseball; and the short

story "On the Air."

In My Life As a Man (1974), Roth not only introduces his

most developed protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, but but

for the first time his fiction becomes highly self-reflexive

and postmodern. One of his most significant literary

efforts is the Zuckerman trilogy: The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and wrapped up with a novella epilogue, "The Prague Orgy" (1985). These novels trace the development of Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, from an aspiring young writer to a socially compromised, and psychologically besieged, literary celebrity. In The Counterlife (1986), perhaps his most ambitious and meticulously structured novel, Roth brings a temporarily end to his Zuckerman writings. It is also the first time that the author engages in a sustained examination of the relationship between American and Israeli Jews.

His next four books--The Facts (1988),Deception (1990),Patrimony (1991),and Operation Shylock--explore the relationship between the lived world and the written world, between "fact" and "fiction." Through his protagonist in these works, also named Philip Roth, the author questions the genres of autobiography and fiction, and he mischievously encourages the reader to become caught up in this literary game. Of these four books, only one, Deception, is billed as a novel. The other three are subtitled as either an autobiography (The Facts), a memoir or "true story" (Patrimony), or a confession (Operation Shylock). The most elaborate of these, Operation Shylock, is arguably Roth's finest work, leading fellow writer Cynthia Ozick to call it in one of her interviews, "the Great American Jewish Novel" and Roth "the boldest American writer alive."

His most recent novel, The Plot Against America, takes Roth into fresh literary territory. It is an alternative history whose premise is the 1940 election of Charles A. Lindbergh to the White House. What, Roth asks, would America have been like had the isolationist and anti-Semitic Lindbergh defeated F.D.R., reached a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, and kept the United States out of the Second World