Everyman

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.

In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus ¿ a collection of stories, and a novella ¿ for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy¿s Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of Americäs finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Roth¿s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.

"Roth's writing looks uncompromisingly straightforward but is subtle and clever... A human story for our times" -- A. S. Byatt New Statesman "The genius of this short, bleak, remarkable novel stems from the way that Roth turns his desolate assessment of death into something bracing: an angry acceptance that mortality is the price we pay for the sheer wonder of this thing called life" -- Douglas Kennedy The Times "This elegant little book shimmers with the mysteries and regrets of a whole life...poignant, droll, and eloquent" -- Lionel Shriver Daily Telegraph "Alive with literary brilliance for all its deathly subject matter" -- Peter Kemp Sunday Times "Every sentence and every paragraph works with the coiled precision of the watch mechanisms that the narrators father repairs and glitters with the lapidary perfection of the perfection he sells" -- Tim Martin Independent on Sunday

A human story for our times A.S. Byatt