Literary giant Philip Roth dies at 85.
NEW YORK >> Philip Roth, the prize-winning novelist and fearless narrator of sex, death, assimilation and fate, from the comic madness of “Portnoy’s Complaint” to the elegiac lyricism of “American Pastoral,” died Tuesday night at age 85.
Roth’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, said that the author died in a New York City hospital of congestive heart failure.
Author of more than 25 books, Roth was a fierce satirist and uncompromising realist, confronting readers in a bold, direct style that scorned false sentiment or hopes for heavenly reward. He was an atheist who swore allegiance to earthly imagination, whether devising pornographic functions for raw liver or indulging romantic fantasies about Anne Frank. In “The Plot Against America,” published in 2004, he placed his own family under the anti-Semitic reign of President Charles Lindbergh. In 2010, in “Nemesis,” he subjected his native New Jersey to a polio epidemic.
He was among the greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize. But he received virtually every other literary honor, including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle prizes and, in 1998, the Pulitzer for “American Pastoral.” He was in his 20s when he won his first award and awed critics and fellow writers by producing some of his most acclaimed novels in his 60s and 70s, including “The Human Stain” and “Sabbath’s Theater,” a savage narrative of lust and mortality he considered his finest work.
He identified himself as an American writer, not a Jewish one, but for Roth the American experience and the Jewish experience were often the same. While predecessors such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud wrote of President Barack Obama, right, presents a National Humanities Medal to novelist Philip Roth during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. the Jews’ painful adjustment asking Roth if he would have from immigrant life, Roth’s written the same books in characters represented the Nazi Germany. The Jewish next generation. Their first scholar Gershom Scholem language was English, and called “Portnoy’s Complaint” they spoke without accents. the “book for which all antiSemites They observed no rituals and have been praying.” belonged to no synagogues. When Roth won the Man The American dream, or Booker International Prize, nightmare, was to become in 2011, a judge resigned, alleging “a Jew without Jews, without that the author suffered Judaism, without Zionism, from terminal solipsism without Jewishness.” and went “on and on The reality, more often, and on about the same subject was to be regarded as a Jew in almost every single among gentiles and a gentile book.” In “Sabbath’s Theater,” among Jews. Roth imagines the inscription
In the novel “The Ghost for his title character’s Writer” he quoted one of his headstone: “Sodomist, heroes, Franz Kafka: “We Abuser of Women, Destroyer should only read those books of Morals.” that bite and sting us.” For Roth’s wars also originated his critics, his books were to from within. He survived be repelled like a swarm of a burst appendix in bees. the late 1960s and near-suicidal
Feminists, Jews and one depression in 1987. After ex-wife attacked him in the disappointing reaction print, and sometimes in person. to his 1993 novel, “Operation Women in his books Shylock,” he fell again were at times little more into severe depression and than objects of desire and for years rarely communicated rage and The Village Voice with the media. For once put his picture on its all the humor in his work — cover, condemning him as and, friends would say, in private a misogynist. A panel moderator life — jacket photos usually berated him for his highlighted the author’s comic portrayals of Jews, tense, dark-eyed glare.