Philip Roth

Roth grew up in Newark's Weequahic neighborhood, the son of an insurance broker, in a Jewish enclave that supplied material for six decades of fiction under different names. He went to Rutgers for a year, then Bucknell, where he graduated magna cum laude, then took a master's in English at the University of Chicago in 1955. The Army drafted him that year and discharged him almost immediately for a back injury from basic training. He taught briefly at Chicago and started publishing short fiction, and in 1959 Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five stories about class and assimilation among Newark's Jews, won the National Book Award before he had turned 27.

Portnoy's Complaint, a confessional monologue soaked in sex and guilt, made him famous and notorious in 1969 and set the template — a narrator close enough to Roth himself that readers spent decades arguing over where the man ended and the character began. He kept going at a pace few novelists match: the Zuckerman novels, Sabbath's Theater, and the late trilogy of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain. American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. He taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania until 1991, collected a Man Booker International Prize in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal in 2010, and in October 2012, at 79, announced he was done writing fiction altogether.

His first marriage, to Margaret Martinson in 1959, ended in divorce in 1963 and supplied raw material for My Life as a Man. Martinson died in a car accident in 1968. His second, to the actress Claire Bloom from 1990 to 1994, ended worse in public: her 1996 memoir Leaving a Doll's House described him as controlling and cruel, and the accusation of misogyny followed him through years of fiction that critics said treated women mostly as instruments of male self-examination. Roth never answered it directly in interviews, though much of his late work interrogates exactly that kind of unreliable, self-justifying male narrator. He also suffered a breakdown in the mid-1980s tied to the sedative Halcion, which he later wrote about at length.

He died of heart failure in Manhattan on May 22, 2018, and asked that no religious ritual be performed at the funeral. He is buried at Bard College, not in Newark. Before his death he instructed his executors to destroy most of his personal papers once his authorized biography was finished, so that Blake Bailey's account, published in April 2021, would stand largely alone — and then the publisher halted the book two weeks after release when sexual assault allegations surfaced against Bailey himself, a coda stranger than anything Roth had invented. A smaller press reissued it that May. What survives of the papers he wanted destroyed remains contested.

Philip Roth's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Goodbye, Columbus book
  Won the National Book Award before he turned 27 1959
• Portnoy's Complaint book
  The novel that made him famous and notorious in the same year 1969
• American Pastoral book
  Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1997
• The Human Stain book 2000
• The Plot Against America book
  An alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 election 2004

• 1950 aged ~17 Graduates from Weequahic High School in Newark
• 1955 aged ~22 Earns a master's at the University of Chicago Drafted into the Army the same year and quickly discharged.
• 1959 aged ~26 Marries Margaret Martinson, and Goodbye, Columbus wins the National Book Award
• 1969 aged ~36 Portnoy's Complaint makes him famous
• 1990 aged ~57 Marries Claire Bloom
• 1997 aged ~64 Wins the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral
• October 2012 aged 79 Announces his retirement from writing fiction He was 79.
• May 22, 2018 aged 85 Dies of heart failure in Manhattan

• Saul Bellow 1915–2005
  Novelist whose intellectually rich fiction explored individuality, urban life, and the immigrant experience in modern America. friend and fellow novelist
• Norman Mailer 1923–2007
  Novelist and journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes and helped establish literary nonfiction. contemporary and rival
• John Updike 1932–2009
  Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose Rabbit series chronicled the anxieties of suburban American men. contemporary, often paired with him by critics
• Arthur Miller 1915–2005
  Playwright whose Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are cornerstones of American drama. fellow chronicler of Jewish American identity