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.
The American Trilogy 1997-2000
The American Trilogy 1997-2000
For the last half century, the novels of Philip Roth have re-energized American fiction and redefined its possibilities. Roth’s comic genius, his imaginative daring, his courage in exploring uncomfortable truths, and his assault on political, cultural, and sexual orthodoxies have made him one of the essential writers of our time. By special arrangement with the author, The Library of America continues the definitive edition of Roth’s collected works.
The tragic hero of American Pastoral (1997) is Seymour “Swede” Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory—who comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country goes to war in Vietnam, and the family of this strong, confident master of social equilibrium is overwhelmed by the forces of disorder unleashed by the turbulent 1960s.
I Married a Communist (1998) is set in America’s anti-Communist 1940s. Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. A self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in World War II a clandestine and formidable Communist. His passionate commitment to Marxist revolution in America will lead him to ruin in the era of the blacklist.
The Human Stain (2000) concludes Roth’s singular trilogy of postwar American lives that are harshly determined both by the nation’s fate and the “stain” that ineradicably marks human nature. The time is 1998, the year of the presidential impeachment; the location is a small New England town, where an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues declare him a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would astonish his most virulent accuser—a hidden private history that Roth deftly interweaves with the sanctimonious moral climate of Silk’s American moment.
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.