Philip Roth biography

Philip Roth Biography

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. He attended Rutgers University before receiving his B.A. at Bucknell and his M.A. from the University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1956. He taught English at a number of universities including the University of Pennsylvania where he was writer-in-residence for fifteen years. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, was published in 1959 and won the National Book Award for fiction. Patrimony (1991) was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Operation Shylock (1993) of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Sabbath's Theater (1995) of the National Book Award. American Pastoral was his twentieth book. In 2005, he became the third living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes was published in 2013.

In an interview with a French magazine in 2012, Roth said that he did not intend to write any more novels, and had not been working on anything new since his last novel, Nemesis, was published in 2010:

Talking about the period after Nemesis was published, Roth says that he reread all his work in reverse chronological order, and "decided that I was done with fiction. I do not want to read, to write more...I have dedicated my life to the novel: I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough! I no longer feel this fanaticism to write that I have experienced in my life."

He died of congestive heart failure at a hospital in Manhattan on May 22, 2018, at the age of 85


Fiction Bibliography

David Kepesh series
The Breast (1973)
The Professor of Desire (1977)
The Dying Animal (2001)

Zuckerman series
My Life as a Man (1974)
The Ghost Writer (1979)
Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
The Prague Orgy (1985)
Exit Ghost (2007)

American Trilogy
American Pastoral (1997)
I Married a Communist (1998)
The Human Stain (2000)

Novels
Letting Go (1962)
When She Was Good (1967)
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Our Gang: Starring Tricky And His Friends (1971)
The Great American Novel (1973)
The Counterlife (1987)
Deception (1990)
Patrimony: A True Story (1991)
Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993)
His Mistress's Voice (1995)
Sabbath's Theater (1995)
The Plot Against America (2004)
Everyman (2006)
Indignation (2008)
The Humbling (2009)
Nemesis (2010)

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