Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth was born March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey, the city that would anchor much of his fiction. He gained attention in 1959 with the short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award for Fiction. A decade later Portnoy's Complaint became a bestseller and cemented his reputation for provocative explorations of desire, identity, and the Jewish-American experience. Over the decades he built a body of work - often narrated by his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman or by fictionalized versions of himself - that blurred reality and invention with what critics called a "sensual, ingenious style." The honors accumulated: another National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, the Pulitzer for American Pastoral, the PEN/Faulkner three times, and in 2001 the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize. In 2005 the Library of America began publishing his complete works while he still lived, a distinction shared only with Eudora Welty. He died May 22, 2018, having spent a career constructing and deconstructing life through language with a restlessness that never let up.