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 1973-1977
Novels 1973-1977
This third volume of The Library of America’s definitive edition of Philip Roth’s collected works presents three markedly different novels that together trace a crucial period in the bold evolution of one of America’s indispensable novelists.
In The Great American Novel (1973), a hilarious, bizarre, strangely poignant tall tale of American pieties and American lunacy, Roth lifts the lid on the suppressed history of the homeless Ruppert Mundys of baseball’s despised and vanquished third major league, turning the national pastime into unfettered picaresque farce. The cast of improbable characters includes: Gil Gamesh, the pitcher who actually tried to kill the umpire; John Baal, the ex-con first baseman, “The Babe Ruth of the Big House,” who never hit a home run sober; and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
My Life as a Man (1974) is Roth’s most blistering novel, the savage, sometimes lurid account of the all-out battle waged between the young writer Peter Tarnopol and the wife who is his nemesis, his demon, and his muse. This is the treacherous world of Strindberg nearly a century later: the story of a fierce marital tragedy of obsession and blindness and desperate need.
The volume closes with The Professor of Desire (1977), which charts the second sexual metamorphosis of David Kepesh, protagonist of The Breast. Roth follows Kepesh, an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling, into a vast wilderness of erotic possibility. The Professor of Desire is the troublingly affecting novel about the dilemmas of desire that prompted Milan Kundera to proclaim Roth “a great historian of modern eroticism.”
Ross Miller, editor, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. His criticism has appeared in scholarly journals, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. 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.