Philip Roth Books

Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 story collection Goodbye, Columbus, and has since become one of the most honored authors of his generation: Roth's 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. His 2000 novel The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year.

Easton Press Philip Roth books

  Portnoy's Complaint - 1999

Franklin Library Philip Roth books

  Goodbye Columbus and Stories - signed limited edition - 1978
  The Ghost Writer - limited first edition ( not signed ) - 1979
  Zuckerman Unbound - limited first edition ( not signed ) - 1981
  The Anatomy Lesson - signed first edition - 1983
  The Counterlife - signed first edition - 1986
  Operation Shylock - signed first edition - 1993
  American Pastoral - signed first edition - 1997
  I Married a Communist - signed first edition - 1998
  The Human Stain - signed first edition - 2000

 

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Author Philip Roth

Roth first gained attention with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, for which he received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. He became one of the most awarded American writers of his generation. His books twice received the National Book Award and 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 one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, a character in many of Roth's novels. The Human Stain (2000), another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2001, in Prague, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize.

Life and writing

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. Roth went on to attend 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 went on to teach 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.

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. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five short stories, won the National Book Award in 1960, and afterward 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 Nathan Zuckerman alter ego. In a series of highly self-referential novels and novellas that followed between 1979-1986, Zuckerman appeared as either the main character or as an interlocutor.

In Sabbath's Theater (1995), Roth presented his most lecherous protagonist yet with 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.

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.

In one of his most audacious books to date, The Plot Against America (2004), Roth imagines an alternative version of American history: What if Charles A. Lindbergh, aviator hero and isolationist had been elected U.S. president in 1940? In the imagined history that follows, Roth gives an account of a U.S. that negotiates an understanding with Hitler's Nazi Germany and embarks on its own program of anti-Semitism. It has been hailed as Roth's masterpiece. "Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving… It may well be his best, and it may well arouse more controversy than all the rest combined.… That Roth has written The Plot Against America in some respects as a parable for our times seems to me inescapably and rather regrettably true."

Roth's 182-page novel Everyman, a meditation on illness, desire, and death, was published in May 2006.

Exit Ghost, which features his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, was released in October 2007. According to the book's publisher, it is the last Zuckerman novel.

Indignation, Roth's twenty-ninth book, was published on September 16, 2008. Set in 1951 to the backdrop of the Korean War, it follows Marcus Messner's departure from Newark to Ohio's Winesburg College, where he begins his sophomore year.

Roth’s 30th and 31st books will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the publisher announced on February 25, 2009. The Humbling, which is scheduled for the fall, is a novel about an aging stage actor whose empty life is altered by “a counterplot of unusual erotic desire,” the publisher said. HMH also released Nemesis, a work of fiction set in the summer of 1944 that tells of a polio epidemic and its effects on a closely knit Newark community and its children.

 

Roth died at a Manhattan hospital of congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018, at the age of 85. 

Philip Roth books in order

Zuckerman novels

The Ghost Writer (1979)
Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
The Prague Orgy (1985)
The Counterlife (1986)
American Pastoral (1997)
I Married a Communist (1998)
The Human Stain (2000)
Exit Ghost (2007)

Kepesh novels

The Breast (1972)
The Professor of Desire (1977)
The Dying Animal (2001)

Nemeses novels

Everyman (2006)
Indignation (2008)
The Humbling (2009)
Nemesis (2010)

Roth novels

Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)
The Plot Against America (2004)

Other fiction

Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (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)

Memoirs

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
Deception: A Novel (1990)
Patrimony: A True Story (1991)

 

 

Source and additional information: Philip Roth