Philip Roth | Biography, American Pastoral, Books, American Trilogy, & Facts | Britannica (2024)

Philip Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.—died May 22, 2018, New York, New York) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works are characterized by an acute ear for dialogue, a concern with Jewish middle-class life, and the painful entanglements of sexual and familial love. In Roth’s later years his works were informed by an increasingly naked preoccupation with mortality and with the failure of the aging body and mind.

Roth received an M.A. from the University of Chicago and taught there and elsewhere. He first achieved fame with Goodbye, Columbus (1959; film 1969), whose title story candidly depicts the boorish materialism of a wealthy Jewish suburban family. The collection earned a National Book Award. Roth’s first novel, Letting Go (1962), was followed in 1967 by When She Was Good, but he did not recapture the success of his first book until Portnoy’s Complaint (1969; film 1972), an audacious satirical portrait of a contemporary Jewish male at odds with his domineering mother and obsessed with sexual experience.

Several minor works, including The Breast (1972), My Life As a Man (1974), and The Professor of Desire (1977), were followed by one of Roth’s most important novels, The Ghost Writer (1979), which introduced an aspiring young writer named Nathan Zuckerman, who is Roth’s alter ego. Two later novels, Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), trace his writer-protagonist’s subsequent life and career and constitute the Zuckerman trilogy. These three works were republished together with the novella The Prague Orgy (film 2019) under the title Zuckerman Bound (1985). After a fourth Zuckerman novel, The Counterlife (1986), Roth released Sabbath’s Theater (1995), about the aging and lascivious Mickey Sabbath, a former puppeteer; it won the National Book Award.

For his next work, American Pastoral (1997; film 2016), Roth was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The novel, about a middle-class couple whose daughter becomes a terrorist, is the first entry in the American Trilogy series, all three books of which are narrated by Zuckerman. The later installments are I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000; film 2003). In The Dying Animal (2001; filmed as Elegy, 2008), an aging literary professor reflects on a life of emotional isolation. The Plot Against America (2004; TV miniseries 2020) tells a counterhistorical story of fascism in the United States during World War II.

With Everyman (2006), a novel that explores illness and death, Roth became the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which he had won previously for Operation Shylock (1993) and The Human Stain. Everyman also marked the start of a period during which Roth produced relatively brief novels, all focused on issues of mortality. Exit Ghost (2007) revisits Zuckerman, who has been reawoken to life’s possibilities after more than a decade of self-imposed exile in the Berkshire Mountains. Indignation (2008; film 2016) is narrated from the afterlife by a man who died at age 19. The Humbling (2009; film 2014) revisits Everyman’s mortality-obsessed terrain, this time through the lens of an aging actor who, realizing that he has lost his talent, finds himself unable to work. A polio epidemic is at the centre of Nemesis (2010), set in Newark, New Jersey, in 1944. In 2011 Roth won the Man Booker International Prize. The following year he announced that he had retired from writing.