Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018)[1] was an American novelist and short story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity.[2] He first gained attention with the 1959 novellaGoodbye, Columbus; the collection so titled received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.[3][4] He became one of the most awarded American writers of his generation.[5] His books twice received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman. The Human Stain (2000), another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2001, in Prague, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize. Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19, 1933,[6] and grew up at 81 Summit Avenue in the Weequahic neighborhood.[6] He was the second child of Bess (née Finkel) and Herman Roth, an insurance broker.[7] Roth's family was Jewish, and his parents were second-generation Americans. Roth's father's parents came from Kozlov near Lviv (then Lemberg) in Austrian Galicia; his mother's ancestors were from the region of Kyiv in Ukraine. He graduated from Newark's Weequahic High School in or around 1950.[8] In 1969 Arnold H. Lubasch wrote in The New York Times, "It has provided the focus for the fiction of Philip Roth, the novelist who evokes his era at Weequahic High School in the highly acclaimed Portnoy's Complaint. Besides identifying Weequahic High School by name, the novel specifies such sites as the Empire Burlesque, the Weequahic Diner, the Newark Museum and Irvington Park, all local landmarks that helped shape the youth of the real Roth and the fictional Portnoy, both graduates of Weequahic class of '50." The 1950 Weequahic Yearbook calls Roth a "boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense." He was known as a comedian during his time at school.[9]

Academic career[edit]

Roth attended Rutgers University in Newark for a year, then transferred to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where he earned a B.A.magna cum laude in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. in English literature[10] in 1955 and briefly worked as an instructor in the university's writing program.[11] That same year, rather than wait to be drafted, Roth enlisted in the army, but he suffered a back injury during basic training and was given a medical discharge. He returned to Chicago in 1956 to study for a PhD in literature but dropped out after one term.[12] Roth taught creative writing at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Iowa and Princeton University. He later continued his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught comparative literature before retiring from teaching in 1991.

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