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Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature. In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus - a collection of stories, and a novella - for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Roth's lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively. Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.
This is no more than a titbit by way of a diversion in the event that you divert easily as once again with downcast eyes Mr. Roth tells the story of David Alan Kepesh, poor nebbish David Alan Kepesh, who having observed the small pink stain on his glans penis suddenly finds himself transformed into a breast. He lies there - in the hospital - watched by doctors and his shrink; visited but unattended to (in the fashion he so excitably desires) by his mistress Claire; thinking, remembering other inabilities - to laugh at my own expense - wondering - did he have a case of mammary envy? - brooding about Kafka and his more famous beetle. Mr. Roth has not spent much time on this concupiscent notion - did it deserve any more? 70 pages - no bigger than an A-cup. (Kirkus Reviews)
