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.
An American Pastoral
An American Pastoral
Here is Philip Roth’s masterpiece—an elegy for the American century’s promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth’s protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father’s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him.
For Swede’s adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, American Pastoral gives us Philip Roth at the height of his powers.