Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth (1933–2018) was born on 19 March 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the second son of Herman Roth, a life insurance salesman, and Bess Finkel Roth. He grew up in the Weequahic section of Newark, a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood whose vitality and claustrophobia pervade his fiction. Roth was a brilliant student, attended Bucknell University and the University of Chicago (where he earned an MA in English literature), and began publishing short fiction in the 1950s.

Life and Career

Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959) won the National Book Award when Roth was twenty-six. Its satirical portraits of Jewish-American life — particularly the nouveau riche Patimkin family — provoked accusations of anti-Semitism and self-hatred that dogged him for decades. Roth discovered early what would become a lifelong condition: the Jewish-American community would never entirely forgive him for the accuracy of his satire.

His early novels — Letting Go (1962), When She Was Good (1967) — were well-crafted but relatively conventional. Then came Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the confession of Alexander Portnoy to his psychoanalyst, a torrent of sexual compulsion, maternal smothering, Jewish guilt, and masturbatory frenzy that made Roth famous, rich, and notorious in a single stroke. The novel was a cultural event, a bestseller, and a scandal.

The 1970s were a period of experimentation and relative critical disappointment. Roth published satirical fantasies (Our Gang, The Breast, The Great American Novel) and the literary self-examination of My Life as a Man (1974), which introduced the writer-protagonist Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman would become Roth’s primary alter ego across nine novels spanning three decades.

The creative renaissance came with The Ghost Writer (1979), a short, exquisite novel in which the young Zuckerman visits an older writer (modelled partly on Malamud, partly on Singer) and imagines that a young woman in the house is Anne Frank. It inaugurated the Zuckerman sequence — Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), The Counterlife (1986), and later American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). The Counterlife (1986), with its multiple, contradictory versions of Zuckerman’s life, is Roth’s most formally daring novel.

The late masterpieces — the “American trilogy” of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain — represent Roth’s reckoning with postwar American history: the 1960s (Vietnam, radical politics), the 1950s (McCarthyism), and the 1990s (political correctness and the Clinton era). American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize.

Roth announced his retirement from writing in 2012 and died on 22 May 2018 in Manhattan.

Major Works and Themes

Roth’s lifelong subjects are the self — its construction, its deceptions, its performances — and the relationship between the individual and the community, particularly the Jewish-American community. He is the great novelist of identity as performance: his characters are constantly inventing, revising, and betraying themselves.

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) is the comic masterpiece: a monologue of extraordinary verbal energy in which sex, Jewish identity, and American desire collide in a single consciousness. It is simultaneously hilarious and harrowing.

The Counterlife (1986) is the formal masterpiece: a novel in which Nathan Zuckerman’s life takes multiple, mutually exclusive directions — to Israel, to England, to death, to rebirth — exposing the fiction-making that underlies all identity. It is Roth’s most radically experimental work and one of the great postmodern novels.

American Pastoral (1997) is the magnum opus: the story of Swede Levov, a golden Jewish-American who achieves the American dream — athletic glory, a beautiful wife, a country estate — only to watch it destroyed when his daughter becomes a Vietnam-era radical bomber. It is Roth’s deepest, most generous, and most devastating novel, a tragedy of American innocence.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Roth was a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize, which he never received — one of the great oversights of the Swedish Academy. He won virtually every other major literary prize: the National Book Award (twice), the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award (three times), the Man Booker International Prize, and the National Humanities Medal.

His critical reputation, once contested, is now largely settled: he is the most important American novelist of the post-Bellow generation, and the question is only where he ranks in the overall American canon — alongside Faulkner and Bellow, or just below them. His influence on subsequent American fiction — on writers like Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, and Joshua Cohen — is profound.

Key Works

• Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
• My Life as a Man (1974)
• The Ghost Writer (1979)
• The Counterlife (1986)
• Patrimony (1991, memoir)
• Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
• American Pastoral (1997)
• I Married a Communist (1998)
• The Human Stain (2000)
• The Plot Against America (2004)
• Nemesis (2010)

Collecting Roth

Philip Roth is a major collecting name in postwar American literature, with particular strength in the academic and literary collecting communities.

Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959, Houghton Mifflin, Boston) is the first book and the primary collectible. The first edition has “First Printing” on the copyright page. Fine copies in the original dust jacket bring $2,000–$8,000. The jacket, with its distinctive pale design, is essential.

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969, Random House, New York) was a massive bestseller and was printed in large quantities. Despite this, fine first editions in the red, white, and blue dust jacket bring $500–$2,000; the jacket design has become iconic.

The Ghost Writer (1979, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York) is the beginning of the mature Roth and a strong collecting title at $200–$800 in the jacket.

The “American trilogy” — American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000) — are all Houghton Mifflin firsts. Fine copies in jackets bring $100–$500 each; the set is increasingly collected together.

The Plot Against America (2004, Houghton Mifflin) has appreciated in value following the political developments that made its premise — a fascist American presidency — seem less like fiction. First editions bring $100–$400.

Roth was a selective signer. He did not participate extensively in public signings, and signed copies carry a meaningful premium — particularly signed firsts of Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint. The Franklin Library and Easton Press issued signed limited editions of several titles; these are collected at $200–$600. Roth’s papers are held at the Library of Congress.