Philip Roth

Philip Roth once said “My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve go to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets. No, they’re little gifts, containing meaning!” This is a great quotation and I agree that words even when arguingagainst something or taking a stand can still be a little gift with great meaning. I think of this quotation when I read poetry. For example in ancient Japan lovers used special paper, ribbonsand poems to convey specific meanings such as love and sex. Virginia Woolf once said “Language is wine upon the lips.” Our library has thousands of books with little gifts full of meaning. From history and science to art and fiction. Books and authors I have shared in this blog that our library has. Like autobiographies of men who endure racism and made history to fictional writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on March 19th, 1933. His grandparents were European Jews who immigrated to the United States in the eighteen hundreds. His first book was Goodbye, Columbus (1959). This book contains a novel and five short stories that depict Jewish American life in post-war America with irony and humor. This book gave him national recognition which included an award the National Book Award for fiction. However he also received reticule from some people in the Jewish communitysaying that what he said showed only the bad side. In 1962 he published Letting Gothat looked at society and ethical problems that occurred during the 1950s.

Roth is most known for Portnoy’s Complaint published in 1969. Using comedy he looks at his middle-class New York Jewish community and the decay of American youth. It was the best seller during this year and made him famous.  In 1974 he writes a book My Life As a Man which for the first time his fiction is postmodern. After this he writes the Zuckerman trilogy which is about the development of his alter ego.

One book our library has called The Plot Against America (2004) is an alternative history which looks at another outcome of the 1940 election. Roth asks what America would have been like with Charles A. Lindbergh as president, who was an isolationist and anti-Semite. Who he have kept the United States out of World War II? The book explores American identities and how history is constructed. He argues that history in many ways fiction.

Roth’s most recent book is Exit Ghost(2007) which is suppose to be the last book were the character Nathan Zuckerman will appear. Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character who appears in several of Roth’s books as a narrator or protagonist and often as an alter ego. He first appears in the novel My Life As a Man. He also appears in The Ghost Writer (1979) , Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), The Counterlife, American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000). Nathan Zuckerman has also appeared on film including the 2003 film The Human Stain. Roth’s book American Pastoral won a Pulitzer Prize.

There are several things Philip Roth has explored in his writing. One thing he looks at is Jewishness in American culture. Much of his early work looked at American idealism and society. He sometimes see his own life as part of his fiction, his work often being semi-autobiographical.  (The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature)

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