Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist whose long catalogue of fiction probed Jewish identity, masculinity, sexuality, and the moral weather of the United States across the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933, he grew up in the Weequahic neighbourhood of second-generation Jewish immigrants, attended Bucknell University, and took a master's degree at the University of Chicago.

His debut, the novella and stories collected as Goodbye, Columbus, won the 1960 National Book Award when he was just twenty-six. The 1969 monologue Portnoy's Complaint made him at once famous and notorious, its frank account of an analysand's sexual furies provoking both bestseller sales and outraged sermons.

From the late 1970s he produced the Zuckerman novels, channelled through his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, and through the 1990s and early 2000s wrote the so-called American Trilogy: American Pastoral, which won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Sabbath's Theater won the 1995 National Book Award. The Plot Against America in 2004 imagined a Lindbergh presidency, and Nemesis in 2010 closed his fiction.

Roth retired from writing in 2012 and donated his manuscripts to the Newark Public Library. He won every major American literary prize except the Nobel, the absence of which became its own conversation. He died in Manhattan in May 2018 at the age of eighty-five.

The given name Philip comes from the Greek Philippos, joining philos meaning "loving" and hippos meaning "horse," yielding "lover of horses." Carried by a Macedonian king and a Christian apostle, it travelled through Newark to mark one of America's most prolific novelists, whose own vigour his name fittingly suggested.