Philip Roth
Author
Born: March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey
Died: May 22, 2018, in New York City
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2010: Arts & Entertainment
A giant of 20th-century literature, novelist Philip Roth was as provocative as he was prolific. His frequent themes included love, lust, aging in America, and middle-class life in his native Newark.
Roth grew up in the Weequahic section of Newark, the second son of an insurance-broker father and a homemaker mother. The family was Jewish and Roth’s Jewish background was a presence in much of his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School, Roth studied at Rutgers for a year before transferring to Bucknell University, where he earned a B.A. in English. He next attended the University of Chicago on a fellowship, earning a master’s degree in English literature.
In 1955, Roth enlisted in the Army, but was given a medical discharge after injuring his back during basic training. He returned to his studies in Chicago, but dropped out of the PhD program after one year. In 1960, Roth’s first book, “Goodbye, Columbus,” a collection of short stories centered on Jewish characters, won the National Book Award. The collection included the title story, a novella that was later adapted into a feature film.
Roth’s first full-length novel, “Letting Go,” arrived in 1962. Seven years later, the controversial and often graphic “Portnoy’s Complaint” hit bookstores, introducing readers to the neurotic Alexander Portnoy. The novel, like “Goodbye, Columbus,” was harshly criticized in some Jewish circles for Roth’s often satirical depictions of Jewish life. But this did little to slow the writer’s ascent to literary stardom.
Much of Roth’s work was semi-autobiographical. His frequent alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, appeared in a series of novels and novellas throughout the 1980s. In 1995, Roth won his second National Book Award for “Sabbath’s Theater,” a novel with a notably lecherous protagonist named Mickey Sabbath. Roth’s 1997 title, “American Pastoral,” about a former star athlete whose daughter becomes a domestic terrorist, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Roth remained prolific into the 20th century. Among his more significant later novels was “The Plot Against America” (2004), an alternative history that imagines the election of Charles Lindbergh as president in 1940 and a violent campaign against American Jews. The New York Times described the novel as “sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous, and, at the same time, plausible.”
Critics accused Roth of self-loathing, but Roth was more-often praised—and honored–for digging into what he saw as the dark side of American life. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Roth the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony. Among other honors, Roth won two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Fiction, and the Man Booker International Prize.
In addition to his writing, Roth was a longtime faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature.