Philip Roth
Biography of Philip Roth :
Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) is a famous and award winning American novelist. He became popular with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award. In 1969 he became a major celebrity with the publication of the controversial Portnoy\'s Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language."
Roth has since become one of the most honored authors of his generation: his books have twice been awarded the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral. His 2001 novel The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom\'s WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. His fiction, set frequently in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally distorting the distinction between reality and fiction.
Life
Philip Roth grew up in Newark, New Jersey, as the second child of first-generation American parents, Jews of Galician descent. Roth attended Bucknell University, earning a degree in English. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received an M.A. in English literature and worked briefly as an instructor in the university\'s writing program. Roth taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and Princeton University. He continued his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1991.
While at Chicago, Roth met the novelist Saul Bellow who became his first wife. Their separation in 1963, left a lasting mark on Roth\'s literary output. Specifically, novelist Martinson was the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth\'s novels, including Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good, and Maureen Tarnopol in My Life As a Man. Between the end of his studies and the publication of his first book in 1959, Roth served two years in the United States Army and then wrote short fiction and criticism for various magazines.
Events in Roth\'s personal life have occasionally been the subject of media scrutiny. According to his pseudo-confessional novel Operation Shylock (1993), Roth suffered a nervous breakdown in the late 1980s. In 1990, he married his long-time companion, English actress Claire Bloom. In 1994 they separated, and in 1996 Bloom published a memoir, Leaving a Doll\'s House, which described the couple\'s marriage in detail.
Career
Roth\'s first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five short stories, won the National Book Award in 1960, and afterwards he published two novels, Letting Go and When She Was Good. However, it was not until the publication of his third novel, Portnoy\'s Complaint, in 1969 that Roth enjoyed widespread commercial and critical success.
During the 1970s Roth experimented in various modes, from the political satire Our Gang to the Kafkaesque The Breast. By the end of the decade Roth had created his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. In a series of highly self-referential novels and novellas that followed between 1979 and 1986, Zuckerman appeared as either the main character or an interlocutor.
Sabbath\'s Theater (1995) has perhaps Roth\'s most lecherous protagonist, Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced former puppeteer. In complete contrast, the first volume of Roth\'s second Zuckerman trilogy, 1997\'s American Pastoral, focuses on the life of virtuous Newark athletics star Swede Levov and the tragedy that befalls him when his teenage daughter transforms into a domestic terrorist during the late 1960s The Dying Animal (2001) is a short novel about eros and death that revisits literary professor David Kepesh, protagonist of two 1970s works, The Breast and The Professor of Desire.
Roth\'s novel Everyman, a meditation on illness, aging, desire, and death, was published in May 2006. In 2009, Roth\'s 30th book The Humbling was published, which told the story of the last performances of Simon Axler, a celebrated stage actor. Roth’s 31st book, Nemesis, was published on October 5, 2010. According to the book\'s notes, Nemesis is the final in a series of four "short novels," which also included Everyman, Indignation and The Humbling.
Influences
Much of Roth\'s fiction revolves around semi-autobiographical themes, while self-consciously and playfully addressing the perils of establishing connections between him and his fictional lives. In Roth\'s fiction, the question of authorship is intertwined with the theme of the idealistic, secular Jewish-American son who attempts to distance himself from Jewish customs and traditions, and from what he perceives as the at times suffocating influence of parents and other community leaders.
Films
Four of Philip Roth\'s novels and short stories have been made into films: Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy\'s Complaint; The Human Stain; and The Dying Animal which was made into the movie Elegy.