Philip Roth

American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall-of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour "Swede" Levov-a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory-comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the...

Along with Saul Bellow's Herzog, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint defined Jewish American literature in the 1960s. Roth's masterpiece takes place on the couch of a psychoanalyst, an appropriate jumping-off place for an insanely comical novel about the Jewish American experience. Roth has written several great books--Goodbye, Columbus and When She Was Good among them, but it is perhaps Portnoy's Complaint for which he is best known.

Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent-film star, the exquisite Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll into...

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully...

Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid...

Roth's "Nemesis" is the story of a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children

The legendary author's essays and interviews explore how fellow writers from Milan Kundera to Edna O'Brien are influenced by time, place, and politics. In Philip Roth's intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics, and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer's highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life. Milan...

Neil Klugman, and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills meet one summer and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion, as it is about love. Goodbye, Columbus is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender, and illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and neighbors in the new postwar America of

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