Philip Roth
Philip Roth (March 19, 1933 - May 22, 2018), born in and lastingly attached to Newark, New Jersy, was one of America’s premier writers of the 20th and the early 21st Centuries. He wrote some short stories, some autobiographical pieces, some essays, and he was generous with introductions and prefaces of other writers’ works. Roth’s towering legacy, his irrepressible creative fountain, however, was the novel. His works garnered an astonishing number and variety of awards, including National Book Awards, Critic’s Circle Awards, PEN/Faulkner Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. He had lifetime achievement awards from the US and other countries. Famously or notoriously, he was considered universally the missing man on the list of Nobel Prizes for Literature.
It is important that the reader not read one or two Roth books and draw conclusions about Roth personally or professionally. He himself regretted beginning his career with Portnoy’s Complaint as his first novel. Over his career, his range is astonishing, from wicked humor to perceptive satire to serious analyses of the American heart and soul to Kafkaesque dismantling of reality to heartfelt explorations of love and loss. He could do anything with his talent, and he did.
Novels 2001-2007
Novels 2001-2007
The Library of America’s definitive edition of Philip Roth’s collected works continues with the novels written in his late sixties and early seventies.
The Dying Animal (2001) completes the chronicle of the erotic metamorphoses of David Kepesh, depicted previously in The Breast and The Professor of Desire. Here Kepesh is over sixty when he sets out to seduce Consuela Castillo, his decorous student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles. Unintentionally, Consuela subverts his well-ordered life with an adventure deformed by jealousy that evolves into a story of grim loss. Roth again entangles the fate of his characters with the social forces that shape our daily lives—in The Dying Animal, with the consequences of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
When the renowned aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America, first because Lindbergh had publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany and then because, once having taken office, he negotiated a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler. What followed for Jews during the Lindbergh presidency—most particularly in the Newark household of the boy Philip Roth—is the subject of The Plot Against America (2004), the fifth of the author’s Roth books.
Exit Ghost (2007) presents the final chapter in the extraordinary literary odyssey of Nathan Zuckerman, begun in 1979’s The Ghost Writer. Like a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, Zuckerman returns to New York after eleven years to find a city radically changed by the dramatic events of the new century. A rash decision quickly propels him into a complex of relationships that will expose him once more to the irresistible force of attraction, the limits of art, and the inevitability of decay.
Ross Miller, volume editor, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut and has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and Trinity College. He is the author of American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago and Here’s the Deal: The Buying and Selling of a Great American City.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.