43 Facts About Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short story writer.

Philip Roth first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the US National Book Award for Fiction.

Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books.

Philip Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation.

In 2001, Philip Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague.

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19,1933, and grew up at 81 Summit Avenue in the Weequahic neighborhood.

Philip Roth was the second child of Bess and Herman Roth, an insurance broker.

Philip Roth's family was Jewish, and his parents were second-generation Americans.

Philip Roth graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in or around 1950.

That same year, rather than wait to be drafted, Philip Roth enlisted in the army, but suffered a back injury during basic training and was given a medical discharge.

Philip Roth returned to Chicago in 1956 to study for a PhD in literature, but dropped out after one term.

Philip Roth taught creative writing at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Iowa and Princeton University.

Philip Roth later continued his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, and taught comparative literature there before retiring from teaching in 1991.

Philip Roth published his first full-length novel, Letting Go, in 1962.

In October 2009, during an interview with Tina Brown of The Daily Beast to promote The Humbling, Philip Roth considered the future of literature and its place in society, stating his belief that within 25 years the reading of novels will be regarded as a "cultic" activity:.

Much of Philip Roth's fiction revolves around semi-autobiographical themes, while self-consciously and playfully addressing the perils of establishing connections between Philip Roth and his fictional lives and voices.

Examples of this close relationship between the author's life and his characters' include narrators and protagonists such as David Kepesh and Nathan Zuckerman as well as the character "Philip Roth", who appears in The Plot Against America and of whom there are two in Operation Shylock.

Philip Roth's fiction has been described by critics as pervaded by "a kind of alienation that is enlivened and exacerbated by what binds it".

Philip Roth's first work, Goodbye, Columbus, was an irreverently humorous depiction of the life of middle-class Jewish Americans, and met controversy among reviewers, who were highly polarized in their judgments; one criticized it as infused with a sense of self-loathing.

Philip Roth described American Pastoral and the two following novels as a loosely connected "American trilogy".

Philip Roth was a baseball fan, and credited the game with shaping his literary sensibility.

Martinson was the inspiration for female characters in several of Philip Roth's novels, including Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good and Maureen Tarnopol in My Life as a Man.

In 1990 Philip Roth married his longtime companion, English actress Claire Bloom, with whom he had been living since 1976.

Some critics have detected parallels between Bloom and the character Eve Frame in Philip Roth's I Married a Communist.

Philip Roth died at a Manhattan hospital of heart failure on May 22,2018, at the age of 85.

Philip Roth was buried at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where in 1999 he taught a class.

Philip Roth had originally planned to be buried next to his parents at the Gomel Chesed Cemetery in Newark, but changed his mind about fifteen years before his death, in order to be buried close to his friend, the novelist Norman Manea.

Philip Roth expressly banned any religious rituals from his funeral service, though it was noted that only one day after his burial a pebble had been placed on top of his tombstone in accordance with Jewish tradition.

Two of Philip Roth's works won the National Book Award for Fiction; four others were finalists.

In 2002, Philip Roth was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Philip Roth was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, an award he received twice.

In May 2011, Philip Roth was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction on the world stage, the fourth winner of the biennial prize.

Observers noted that Callil had a conflict of interest, having published a book by Claire Bloom that criticized Philip Roth and lambasted their marriage.

Philip Roth, though, gets better and better in middle age.

In 2012 Philip Roth received the Prince of Asturias Award for literature.

One prize that eluded Philip Roth was the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he was a favorite of bookmakers and critics for decades.

Philip Roth worked hard to obtain his many awards, spending large amounts of time "networking, scratching people's backs, placing his people in positions, voting for them" in order to increase his chances of receiving awards.

McGrath adds that in the 1990s Philip Roth "underwent a kind of sea change and, borne aloft by that extraordinary second wind, produced some of his very best work": Sabbath's Theater and the American Trilogy.

Philip Roth left his book collection and more than $2 million to the Newark Public Library.

Philip Roth wanted to ensure that Bailey, who was producing exactly the type of biography he wanted, would be the only person outside a small circle of intimates permitted to access personal, sensitive manuscripts, including the unpublished Notes for My Biographer and Notes on a Slander-Monger.

In May 2021, the Philip Roth Society published an open letter imploring Roth's executors 'to preserve these documents and make them readily available to researchers.

In one sense Philip Roth is the culmination of the unsolved riddle of Jewish literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Philip Roth's words dressed his father for death, and they dressed so many of us for life.