Philip Roth, author of The Human Stain and Portnoy's Complaint, dies aged 85
Updated
Author Philip Roth, who was both hailed and derided for laying bare the neuroses and obsessions that haunted the modern Jewish-American experience, has died at the age of 85, The New York Times reported.
Key points:
- He won a host of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize
- His 2000 novel The Human Stain was made into a film starring Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins
- Many of his novels explored the Jewish experience in America, but Roth said he was an atheist
The cause of Roth's death was congestive heart failure, close friend Judith Thurman told The New York Times.
Roth wrote more than 30 books, including The Human Stain, published in 2000 and released in 2003 as a movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for 1997's American Pastoral, which examined the impact of the 1960s on a New Jersey family.
In his later years, Roth turned to the existential and sexual crises of middle age, never abandoning his commitment to exploring shame, embarrassment and other guilty secrets of the self, although usually with a heavy dose of humour.
After more than 50 years as a writer, Roth decided that 2010's Nemesis — the story of a polio epidemic in the Newark, New Jersey, neighbourhood where he grew up — would be his last novel.
He then went back and reread all his works "to see whether I'd wasted my time," he said in a 2014 interview published in The New York Times Book Review.
For his conclusion, he quoted Joe Lewis, the heavyweight boxing champion of the 1930s and 40s: "I did the best I could with what I had."
'Put the id back in yid'
Roth's best-known work was the 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint, a first-person narrative about Alexander Portnoy, a young middle-class Jewish New Yorker.
The book featured several notorious masturbation scenes and a narrator who declared he wanted to "put the id back in yid".
Although his novels often explored the Jewish experience in America, Roth, who said he was an atheist, rejected being labelled a Jewish-American writer.
Some critics said Roth's novels exposed him as a self-hating Jew who played on negative stereotypes or generally cast Jews in a bad light.
Roth's fictional alter ego
Roth's first published book was the 1959 novella and short-story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award.
Several of his novels, including Zuckerman Unbound, The Ghost Writer and The Anatomy Lesson feature Nathan Zuckerman, a character who came to be seen as Roth's fictional alter ego.
Roth liked to play with the distinctions between fact and fiction, often writing about neurotic novelists and even giving some of his characters his own first name, Philip.
Yet he was frequently annoyed and amused by readers' desire to project the real Roth onto his characters.
'Filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety'
Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey.
The son of an insurance salesman, Roth earned a master's degree in English from the University of Chicago, but dropped out of a doctoral program in 1959 to write film reviews.
He later taught literature at several universities, retiring in 1992.
Roth had a long relationship with British actress Claire Bloom but their five-year marriage ended in divorce in 1995.
Roth said the act of writing for him was "filled with fear and loneliness and anxiety".
But, he added, "There are some days that compensate completely. In my life I have had, in total, a couple of months of these completely wonderful days as a writer, and that is enough."
Reuters
Topics: books-literature, author, united-states
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