Description
Book SynopsisPhilip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.
In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus a collection of stories, and a novella for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave
Trade Review
Terrific...inventive and sane and very funny * New York Times Book Review *
Roth is a living master -- Harold Bloom
Roth's prose is, as ever, elegant and intelligent, delicate even when at its most crude. It sent me back to Kafka - a brave thing to do, but he stands the comparison well -- Margaret Drabble
A new shock world of sensual possibility... Need one say again that Roth is an admirable novelist who never steps twice into the same river? -- Anthony Burgess
Hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes - the joke takes three steps beyond savagery and satire and turns into a sublimeness of pity. One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture -- Cynthia Ozick
