Prolific ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ author Philip Roth dies at 85
‘Goodbye, Columbus’ won first of his two National Book Awards
Philip Roth, whose sexually scandalous comic novel “Portnoy’s Complaint” brought him literary celebrity after its publication in 1969 and who was eventually hailed as one of America’s greatest living authors for the blunt force and controlled fury of his dozens of later works, died May 22 at 85.
His literary agent confirmed the death to the Associated Press. He had congestive heart failure, his friend Judith Thurman told the New York Times. No other details were immediately available.
Roth’s 1959 debut story collection, “Goodbye, Columbus,” earned him the first of two National Book Awards. He would go on to publish 27 novels, two memoirs and several more story collections by the time he publicly retired from writing in 2012. His lifelong themes included sex and desire, health and mortality, and Jewishness and its obligations — arguably his most definitive subject, given the controversy surrounding his earliest works.
In later years, his focus shifted more frankly to the nation and its discontents, from the rise of Richard Nixon as a political figure in the early Cold War era to the sideshow of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in what became known as Roth’s “American Trilogy”: “American Pastoral” (1997), “I Married a Communist” (1998) and “The Human Stain” (2000).
“He at once talked about America and American-ness, but filtered it through the history of the 20th century at large,” said Aimee Pozorski, an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University who had written extensively about Roth.
“He wrote about the American response to the Holocaust, but also about its effects in Israel and Central and Eastern Europe,” Pozorski said. “He talked about the spread of, and simultaneous fear of, communism in the U.S. but also considered cultural shifts in Prague during that time. He could write about these international issues because he was truly cosmopolitan, a global citizen who was grounded by American culture.”
She called Roth “the voice of his generation.”
Well into his senior years, he continued to win the highest laurels of his profession with new, evocative works. In 1993, his “Operation Shylock: A Confession” won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner prize; in 1995, “Sabbath’s Theater” won the National Book Award; in 1997, “American Pastoral” won the Pulitzer Prize.
His topics were often autobiographical, yet so tantalizingly veiled that “Philip Roth” appeared in several novels.
Roth relished blurring the line between fact and fiction; his second wife, the English-born actress Claire Bloom, felt betrayed when she read a manuscript of “Deception: A Novel” (1990), a brutally frank anatomy of infidelity that featured characters named Philip and Claire.
Roth removed Bloom’s name before publishing, but included an afterword with the figures arguing.
Roth’s 1987 memoir, “The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography,” was framed by his correspondence with one of his frequent fictional alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman. The author asked his creation for feedback.
“Don’t publish,” Zuckerman replied at the end of the memoir, delivering a harsh critique of the “real” Roth for all his blind spots and willful omissions.
Zuckerman, like Roth a Jewish writer assaulted by Jewish critics at the outset of his career, was one of several figures Roth returned to repeatedly in his fiction.
Roth’s home town of Newark, New Jersey, also often figured in his work. His final novel, “Nemesis” (2010), recalls the panic during the polio scare of the 1940s.