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 and Other Narratives
Novels and Other Narratives
This fifth volume of The Library of America’s definitive edition of Philip Roth’s collected works presents four books that exemplify the description of Roth, proposed by British novelist Anthony Burgess, as a writer “who never steps twice into the same river.”
The Counterlife (1986) is a book of astonishing 180-degree turns, of conflicting perspectives and points of view, and, by far, Roth’s most radical novel to date. The subject is people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Illuminating these lives in transition is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence of the writer Nathan Zuckerman.
In 1987, a year after the imaginative extravaganza of The Counterlife, Roth reverses field with The Facts, the first of the “Roth Books.” The Facts presents the author’s own battles defictionalized and unadorned, and concludes with the unique assault that Roth mounts against his own proficiencies as an autobiographer.
At the center of the second of the Roth Books, Deception (1990), are a married American named Philip, living in London, and the married Englishwoman—trapped with a little child in a loveless upper-middle-class household—who eloquently and minutely reveals herself to her lover as they talk before and after making love. With the skill of a brilliant observer of the illicit and the intimate, Roth presents the highly enclosed world of adultery with a directness that has no equal in American fiction.
In the third Roth Book, Patrimony (1991), Philip Roth watches as Herman Roth, his 86-year-old father—famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections—battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, revealing the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished Herman’s passionate engagement with life.
Ross Miller, editor, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut and has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and Trinity College. 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.