Philip Roth
In 1959, a short story collection called Goodbye, Columbus arrived and brought its author, Philip Roth, his first significant public attention. That debut announced a writer who would go on to produce fiction, essays, screenplays, and poetry across a career spanning more than half a century, working throughout in the English language.
Roth was born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, and attended Weequahic High School there before going on to Rutgers University, Bucknell University, and eventually the University of Chicago. He worked as a university teacher alongside his writing life. His 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint brought him further prominence, and he returned repeatedly to a fictional alter ego named Nathan Zuckerman, a figure who threads through a substantial portion of his body of work. He also ventured into alternate history with The Plot Against America, a novel that imagines a version of the United States diverging from the historical record.
Over the course of his career, Roth accumulated a notable set of literary honors. He received the National Book Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the International Booker Prize. Those awards together mark a body of work recognized across American and international literary circles. He worked across multiple forms — as a novelist, essayist, poet, screenwriter, and science fiction writer — making him difficult to place in any single category.
Roth died on May 22, 2018, in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-five. His receipt of the International Booker Prize stands as one marker of the international reach his fiction achieved during his lifetime, a recognition that extended well beyond the American readership that first encountered him through Goodbye, Columbus nearly sixty years before his death.
Quotes by Philip Roth
Philip Roth's insights on:
I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.
Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that.
You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor.
I needed my life as a springboard for my fiction. I have to have something solid under my feet when I write. I'm not a fantasist. I bounce up and down on the diving board, and I go into the water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout.
At night, I read. I read for two hours. I just finished a marvelous book by Louise Erdrich, 'The Round House.' But mostly I read 20th-century history and biography. I lived then. I was either a child or at school or at work.
For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.
Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in.
I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
My goal would be to find a big, fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I'll die. What's agony is starting; I hate starting them. I just want to keep writing now and end when it ends.