Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in the Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic. His early fiction frequently drew on Jewish culture and family life in Newark, and the story collection Goodbye, Columbus (1959) cemented his reputation as a top young American writer. Reviewing his youthful worldview, Roth (referring to himself in the third person) later wrote, "His cultural ambitions were formulated in direct opposition to the triumphant, suffocating American philistinism of that time: he despised Time, Life, Hollywood, television, the best-seller list, advertising copy, McCarthysim, Rotary Clubs, racial prejudice, and the American booster mentality."

After two long, serious, bleak novels, Roth was "aching to write something freewheeling and funny." In Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Roth blended ambiguous nostalgia for his Weequahic boyhood with ribald, delirious accounts of sexual adventures, including several notorious masturbation scenes. The book's narrator declared his intent to "put the id back in yid." This essential novel set the tone for the unflinching, absurdist look at human sexuality that runs through Roth's novels since. His attitude is no Utopian paean to the redemptive powers of sex, but rather a recognition of desire's powerful hold on the human psyche and a contempt for all attempts to repress or control that power through conventional morality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959)
Letting Go (1962)
When She Was Good (1967)
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Our Gang (starring Tricky and his friends) (1971)
The Breast (1972)
The Great American Novel (1973)
My Life As a Man (1974)
The Professor of Desire (1977)
The Ghost Writer (1979)
A Philip Roth Reader (1980)
Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (1985)
The Counterlife (1986)
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
Deception (1990)
Patrimony (1991)
Operation Shylock (1993)
Sabbath's Theater (1995)
American Pastoral (1997)
I Married a Communist (1998)
The Human Stain (2000)
The Dying Animal (2001)
Reading Myself and Others (2001)

REFERENCE

The Philip Roth Society contains extensive bibliographies of works by and about Roth.

Pegasos has a fine biographical essay about Philip Roth with lengthy quotes from his writings.
Pegasos

The New York Times featured author page on Philip Roth collects reviews, articles and interviews from the Times dating back to 1959.
New York Times

ARTICLES

D.T. Max looks at recent work by three aging Jewish writers who won't accept being passé. "They're all past retirement age, they've been thoroughly trashed by feminists and the (many) women in their lives, they seem sadly out of touch with the multicultural literary fashions of the day. But Mailer, Roth and Bellow refuse to go quietly."
Salon (May 1997)

Bettina Knauer discusses Philip Roth's treatment of sex in Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath's Theater. "Philip Roth's work is never just about sex. Wherever things get pornographic, you'll find he touches on all important societal discourses: morals, politics, psychology, social culture and not least the metaphysical. . . . All this talk of sexual practices, of licking, blowing, urinating etc., indicates an insatiable, unquenchable desire. It touches upon all discourses, disturbs them, with the idea of pointing to something that is longed-for yet absent from all of them, something that one is inclined to call love or even God."
future frame

Jack Beatty surveys Philip Roth's vision of modern America in his recently completed "post-war trilogy," American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. "The source of evil in the world of Roth's trilogy is the temptation to purity, to expunge the human stain, to repeal the banishment from Paradise."
Atlantic Unbound (Mar 2001)

Nerve's literary columnist Jack Murnighan explores the theme of sexual devotion in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater. . . . Jack Murnighan returns to Philip Roth's novel Sabbath's Theater, this time pondering a scene in which the title character is caught masturbating under compromising circumstances.
Nerve (Oct 2001; Jul 2001)

INTERVIEWS

Charles McGrath interviews Philip Roth about his most recent novels.
New York Times

From 1980: Philip Roth interviews Milan Kundera about literature, politics, censorship, émigré life, laughter and sex.
New York Times

READINGS

Ron Silver reads an eight-minute excerpt from Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth.
Salon