Philip Roth
Personal Information
Description
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Books
Fifty Best American Short Stories
Contents: Survivors / Elsie Singmaster -- Lost Phoebe / Theodore Dreiser -- Golden honeymoon / Ring W. Lardner -- I'm a fool / Sherwood Anderson -- My old man / Ernest Hemingway -- Telephone call / Dorothy Parker -- Double birthday / Willa Cather -- Faithful wife / Morley Callaghan -- Little wife / William March -- Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald-- How beautiful with shoes / Wilbur Daniel Steele -- Resurrection of a life / William Saroyan -- Only the dead know Brooklyn / Thomas Wolfe -- Life in the day of a writer / Tess Slesinger -- Iron City / Lovell Thompson -- Christ in concrete / Pietro Di Donato -- Chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck -- Bright and morning star / Richard Wright -- Hand upon the waters / William Faulkner -- Net / Robert M. Coates -- Nothing ever breaks except the heart / Kay Boyle -- Search through the streets of the city / Irwin Shaw -- Who lived and died believing / Nancy Hale -- Peach stone / Paul Horgan -- Dawn of remembered spring / Jesse Stuart -- Catbird seat / James Thurber -- Of this time, of that place / Lionel Trilling -- Wind and the snow of winter / Walter Van Tilburg Clark -- Enormous radio / John Cheever -- Children are bored on Sunday / Jean Stafford -- NRACP / George P. Elliott -- In Greenwich there are many gravelled walks / Hortense Calisher -- Other foot / Ray Bradbury -- Three players of a summer game / Tennessee Williams -- Mother's tale / James Agee -- Magic barrel / Bernard Malamud -- Circle in the fire / Flannery O'Connor -- First flower / Augusta Wallace Lyons -- Contest for Aaron Gold / Philip Roth -- One ordinary day, with peanuts / Shirley Jackson -- To the wilderness I wander / Frank Butler -- Ledge / Lawrence Sargent Hall -- This morning, this evening, so soon / James Baldwin -- Tell me a riddle / Tillie Olsen -- Old army game / George Garrett -- Pigeon feathers / John Updike -- Sound of a drunken drummer / H.W. Blattner -- Keyhole eye / John Stewart Carter -- Long day's dying / William Eastlake -- Upon the sweeping flood / Joyce Carol Oates.
My Life as a Man
Contains three stories: an autobiographical narrative told by the author Peter Tarnopol and two of Peter's stories, "Useful Fictions."
The great American novel
A story of newspaper life and a man's struggle for security.
Words of Ages
Explorers and early settlers -- The general history of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles / John Smith -- The history and present state of Virginia / Robert Beverley -- Of Plymouth Plantation / William Bradford -- "A model of Christian charity" / John Winthrop -- "In memory of my dear grandchild Anne Bradstreet" / Anne Bradstreet -- "The minister's black veil" / Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Voices of a revolution -- "Sinners in the hands of an angry God" / Jonathan Edwards -- "The way to wealth" / Benjamin Franklin -- "Considerations on keeping Negroes" / John Woolman -- "The last of the Mohicans: a narrative of 1757" / James Fenimore Cooper -- Common sense / Thomas Paine -- Declaration of independence / Thomas Jefferson -- personal letters / John Adams & Abigail Adams -- The search for a national identity -- "On the emigration to America and peopling the western country" / Philip Freneau -- "Federalist no.2" / John Jay -- "The interesting narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano" / Olaudah Equiano -- The history of the Lewis and Clark expedition / Meriwether Lewis & William Clark -- A tour on the prairies / Washington Irving -- "Tecumseh's plea to the Choctaws and the Chickasaws" / Tecumseh -- The shackles of power: three Jeffersonian decades / John Dos Passos. A confident nation -- "The young American" / Ralph Waldo Emerson -- "Resistance to civil government" / Henry David Thoreau -- Woman in the nineteenth century / Margaret Fuller -- "Great are the myths" / Walt Whitman -- "Annexation" / John L. O'Sullivan -- Personal memoirs / Juan Nepomuceno Seguin -- Slavery and the abolition movement -- Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass / Frederick Douglass -- Incidents in the life of a slave girl / Harriet Jacobs -- Uncle Tom's cabin / Harrriet Beecher Stowe -- Sociology for the South / George Fitzhugh -- "Appeal to the Christian women of the South" / Angelina Grimke Weld -- "The hunters of men" / John Greenleaf Whittier -- Civil war and reconstruction -- "The portent" / Herman Melville -- The red badge of courage: an episode of the American Civil War / Stephen Crane -- "Hospital sketches" / Louisa May Alcott -- "O Captain! My Captain!" / Walt Whitman -- "Up from slavery" / Booker T. Washington -- The souls of Black folk / W.E.B. DuBois. Industrializing America -- The closing of the frontier -- O pioneers! / Willa Cather -- "Chiquita" / Bret Harte -- The life and adventure of Nat Love, better known in the cattle country as Deadwood Dick / Nat Love -- "Kansas I" / A Mexican Folk Ballad -- "The passing of the buffalo" / Hamlin Garland -- Black Elk speaks / Black Elk -- Artists render industrialization and urbanization -- "What the engines said" / Bret Harte -- "Life in the iron mills" / Rebecca Harding Davis -- The age of innocence / Edith Wharton -- "Proem: to Brooklyn Bridge" / Hart Crane -- Yekl: a tale of the New York ghetto / Abraham Cahan -- "Chicago" / Carl Sandburg -- Social critics and reformers -- "We are all bound up together" / Francis E. Watkins Harper -- Eighty years and more: reminiscences 1815-1897 / Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- "A church mouse" / Mary Wilkins Freeman -- Huckleberry Finn / Samuel L. Clemens -- The shame of the cities / Lincoln Steffens -- The jungle / Upton Sinclair. Americans abroad and World War I -- The portrait of a lady / Henry James -- "The white man's burden" / Rudyard Kipling -- "The real 'white man's burden'" / Ernest Crosby -- "Hallelujahs" / Jose de Diego -- One of ours / Willa Cather -- "next to of course god america i" / E. E. Cummings -- Democracy and adversity -- The jazz age -- The great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald -- "Song of perfect propriety" / Dorothy Parker -- The flivver king / Upton Sinclair -- Jazz / Toni Morrison -- "The weary blues" / Langston Hughes -- Their eyes were watching God / Zora Neale Hurston -- The Great Depression and the New Deal -- The big money / John Dos Passos -- Waiting for Lefty / Clifford Odets -- "Women on the breadlines" / Meridel LeSueur -- The grapes of wrath / John Steinbeck -- "Colonial Park" / Ralph Ellison -- "Proud day" / Genevieve Taggard. World War II -- "Freedom" / E. B. White -- Battle cry / Leon Uris -- Farewell to Manzanar / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston -- "Apostrophe to the land" / Countee Cullen -- The face of war / Martha Gellhorn -- Night / Elie Wiesel -- Hiroshima / John Hershey -- The challenges of power -- Prosperity and anxiety -- An American childhood / Annie Dillard -- The man in the gray flannel suit / Sloan Wilson -- On the road / Jack Kerouac -- Coming of age in Mississippi / Anne Moody -- The cruicible / Arthur Miller -- The right stuff / Tom Wolfe -- Rights and revolutions -- "Letter from a Birmingham jail" / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- "Message to the grass roots" / Malcolm X -- "Why I want a wife" / Judy Brady -- The house on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros -- Lakota woman / Mary Crow Dog -- "Blowin' in the wind" / Bob Dylan -- The Vietnam years -- One very hot day / David Halberstam -- Going after Cacciato / Tim O'Brien -- "Life at war" / Denise Levertov -- American pastoral / Philip Roth -- "Letters from my father" / Robert Olen Butler.
Zuckerman Bound
A new novella, "The Prague Orgy," takes Nathan Zuckerman to Prague to rescue the stories of an unknown Yiddish writer from oblivion and also forms a startling epilogue to "The Ghost Writer," "Zuckerman Unbound," and "The Anatomy Lesson," all included in this volume.
The Professor of Desire
David Kapesh, an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling, tries to make his way to both pleasure and dignity through a world of sensual possiblities.
Novels & other narratives, 1986-1991
For the last half century, the novels of Philip Roth have re-energized American fiction and redefined its possibilities, leading the critic Harold Bloom to proclaim Roth "our foremost novelist since Faulkner." Roth's comic genius, his imaginative daring, his courage in exploring uncomfortable truths, and his assault on political, cultural, and sexual orthodoxies have made him one of the essential writers of our time. By special arrangement with the author, The Library of America continues the definitive edition of Roth's collected works. This fifth volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works presents four books that exemplify the description of Roth, proposed by British novelist Anthony Burgess, as a writer "who never steps twice into the same river." The Counterlife (1986) is a novel told from conflicting perspectives about people enacting drastic dreams of renewal and escape. The Facts (1988), the first of the Roth Books, is a novelist's autobiography in which the author presents his own battles defictionalized and unadorned. In the second Roth book, Deception (1990), a married American named Philip, living in London, and the married Englishwoman who is his mistress meet sporadically in a secret trysting place where the woman eloquently reveals herself to her lover as they talk before and after making love. In the third Roth book, Patrimony (1991), the author watches as his 86-year-old father, Herman Roth, battles a fatal brain tumor.
The American Trilogy 1997-2000 (American Pastoral / Human Stain / I Married A Communist)
Contains: [American Pastoral]( I Married a Communist The Human Stain
Fictions--Second Edition
Truth or consequences / Alice Adams The egg / Sherwood Anderson Sonny's blues / James Baldwin The lesson / Toni Cade Bambara Sara Cole: a type of love story / Russell Banks The author / Donald Barthelme [Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge]( / Ambrose Bierce A summer tragedy / Arna Bontemps The garden of forking paths / Jorge Luis Borges The demon lover / Elizabeth Bowen Astronomer's wife / Kay Boyle The guest / Albert Camus A small, good thing / Raymond Carver Paul's case / Willa Cather The swimmer / John Cheever The lady with the dog / Anton Chekhov Heart of darkness / Joseph Conard Press clippings / Julio Cortazar Barthelme the author / Julio Cortazar We love Glenda so much / Julio Cortazar The open boat / Stephen Crane The blue hotel / Stephen Crane [The adventure of the speckled band]( / Arthur Conan Doyle Killings / Andre Debus Battle royal / Ralph Ellison King of the bingo game / Ralph Ellison [A rose for Emily]( / William Faulkner That evening star / William Faulkner [Barn burning]( / William Faulkner Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald A very old man with enormous wings / Gabriel Garcia Marquez Thank you for the lovely tea / Mavis Gallant Revenge / Ellen Gilchrist Traceleen, she's still talking / Ellen Gilchrist The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman Dream children / Gail Godwin The train from Rhodesia / Nadine Gordimer The destructors / Graham Greene [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [The birthmark]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne My kinsman, Major Molineux / Nathaniel Hawthorne Moon of Atevo / Larry Heinemann The short happy life of Francis Macomber / Ernest Hemingway On the road / Langston Hughes The lottery / Shirley Jackson The real thing / Henry James Spells / Tama Janowitz A white heron / Sarah Orne Jewett Moving pictures / Charles Johnson The sorcerer's apprentice / Charles Johnson [Araby]( / James Joyce [The dead]( / James Joyce A hungry artist / Franz Kafka The metamorphosis / Franz Kafka In the Penal colony / Franz Kafka Patriotic / Janet Kauffman The only man on Liberty Street / William Melvin Kelley The rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence The horse dealer's daughter / D.H. Lawrence Tickets, please / D.H. Lawrence The ones who walk away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin The black madonna / Doris Lessing A woman on a roof / Doris Lessing To build a fire / Jack London The magic barrel / Bernard Malamud Her first ball / Katherine Mansfield Brooklyn / Paule Marshall Shiloh / Bobbie Ann Mason The necklace / Guy de Maupassant A tree, a rock, a cloud / Carson McCullers [Bartleby the scrivener]( / Herman Melville Patriotism / Yukio Mishima How I met my husband / Alice Munro Where are you going, where have you been? / Joyce Carol Oates By the river / Joyce Carol Oates A good man is hard to find / Flannery O'Connor Revelation / Flannery O'Connor Everything that rises must converge / Flannery O'Connor Guest of the nation / Frank O'Connor I stand here ironing / Tillie Olsen A conversation with my father / Grace Paley The fall of the house of Usher / Edgar Allan Poe [Cask of Amontillado]( / Edgar Allan Poe The jilting of Granny Weatherall / Katherine Anne Porter Flowering Judas / Katherine Anne Porter The grave / Katherine Anne Porter Defender of the faith / Philip Roth Gimpel the fool / Isaac Bashevis Singer The chrysanthemums / John Steinbeck The catbird seat / James Thurber The death of Ivan Ilych / Leo Tolstoy The notorious jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain A & P / John Updike Harrison Bergeron / Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Everyday use / Alice Walker To hell with dying / Alice Walker "Really, doesn't crime pay?" / Alice Walker A worn path / Eudora Welty Petrified man / Eudora Welty Why I live at the P.O. / Eudora Welty The bass, the river, and Sheila Mant / W.D. Wetherell Roman fever / Edith Wharton The man who was almost a man / Richard Wright
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction
Goodbye, Columbus and five short stories
Dramatizations of aspects of American life seen through the comic or tragic predicament of American Jews.
When she was good
The death of her abusive, manipulative older sister prompts seventeen-year-old Em to remember their unpleasant life together, with their parents and then later on their own.
Other Men's Daughters
"Until the day of Merriwether's departure from the house--a month after his divorce--the Merriwether family looked like an ideally tranquil one" we read on the first page of Other Men's Daughters. It is the late 1960s, and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are full of long-haired hippies decked out in colorful garb, but Dr. Robert Merriwether, who teaches at Harvard and has been married for a good long time, hardly takes note. Learned, curious, thoughtful, and a creature of habit, Merriwether is anything but an impulsive man, and yet over the summer, while Sarah, his wife, is away on vacation, he meets a summer student, Cynthia Ryder, and before long the two have fallen into bed and in love. Richard Stern's novel is an elegant and unnerving examination of just how cold and destructive a thing love, "the origin of so much story and disorder," can be.