ROTH, PHILIP

born March 19, 1933, Newark, N.J., U.S. in full Philip Milton Roth American novelist and short-story writer whose works are characterized by an acute ear for dialogue, a concern with Jewish middle-class life, and the painful entanglements of sexual and familial love. Other of his works deal satirically with political and sexual themes. Roth received an M.A. from the University of Chicago and taught there and elsewhere. He first achieved fame with Goodbye Columbus (1959), whose title story candidly depicts the boorish materialism of a Jewish middle-class suburban family. Roth's first novel, Letting Go (1962), was followed in 1967 by When She Was Good, but he did not recapture the success of his first book until Portnoy's Complaint (1969), an audacious satirical portrait of a contemporary Jewish male at odds with his domineering mother and obsessed with sexual experience. Several minor works, including The Breast (1972), My Life As a Man (1974), and The Professor of Desire (1977), were followed by one of Roth's most important novels, The Ghost Writer (1979), which introduced an aspiring young writer named Nathan Zuckerman. Roth's two subsequent novels, Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), trace his writer-protagonist's subsequent life and career. These three novels were republished together with the novella The Prague Orgy under the title Zuckerman Bound (1985). A fourth novel in the series, The Counterlife, appeared in 1993. Roth was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral (1997), a novel about a middle-class couple whose daughter becomes a terrorist.