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.
Reading Myself and Others:
Reading Myself and Others:
The interviews, essays, and articles collected here span a quarter century of Philip Roth’s distinguished career and "reveal [a] preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world." Here is Roth on himself and his work and the controversies it’s engendered. Here too are Roth’s writings on the Eastern European writers he has always championed; and on baseball, American fiction, and American Jews. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master, Reading Myself and Others features his long interview with the Paris Review.