Philip Roth
| Philip Roth | |
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Roth in 1973
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| Born | Philip Milton Roth March 19, 1933 Newark, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Period | 1959–2010 |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Spouse | Margaret Martinson Williams (1959–1963) Claire Bloom (1990–1995) |
Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is an American novelist.
He first gained attention with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of American Jewish life for which he received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Roth's fiction, regularly set in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "supple, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. His profile rose significantly in 1969 after the publication of Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language."
Roth is one of the most awarded American writers of his generation. His books have 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, the subject of many other 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.
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, and grew up in its Weequahic neighborhood. He is the second child of Bess (née Finkel) and Herman Roth, an insurance broker. His family was Jewish, and his parents were first-generation Americans, whose families were from Galicia. He graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in or around 1950. "It has provided the focus for the fiction of Philip Roth, the novelist who evokes his era at Weequahic High School in the highly acclaimed Portnoy's Complaint.... Besides identifying Weequahic High School by name, the novel specifies such sites as the Empire Burlesque, the Weequahic Diner, the Newark Museum and Irvington Park, all local landmarks that helped shape the youth of the real Roth and the fictional Portnoy, both graduates of Weequahic class of '50." The Weequahic Yearbook (1950) describes Roth as "A boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense." Roth was known as a comedian during his time at school. Roth attended Bucknell University, where he earned a B.A., magna cum laude in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received an M.A. in English literature in 1955 and worked briefly as an instructor in the university's writing program. Roth taught 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.
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