PHILIP ROTH
Philip Roth - 1973 by Nancy Crampton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dates: 1933-
Nationality: American
Literary Periods:
American Confessional Period, 1960-
Postwar Period, 1945-1999
Twentieth Century, 1900-1999
Twenty-First Century, 2000-
RELATED AUTHORS
- John Updike
- John O'Hara
- Gore Vidal
SPACE
Philip Roth's books by Tomáš Krist, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Scribner Writers Guide [Database]
Essays on the life and works of Philip Roth, complete works and suggested reading bibliographies
| You'll also want to check out... |
- Literature Resource Center [DATABASE]Includes entries from Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Twayne's Authors Series, and Scribner Writers Series
- Literature Online (LION)Biographical overview, complete bibliography, journal articles, audio & video recordings, and recommended Web sites
RESEARCH & CRITICISM
Books, essays, and journal articles indexed in MLA International Bibliography 
[Database]
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative Roth scholarship published in books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers and the Colby College Libraries catalog. If you discover books or articles through MLA that are not available at Colby or through our lending partners, please request these items using your ILLiad Account.
You'll also want to check out...
The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (2007) by
From the moment that his debut book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), won him the National Book Award, Philip Roth has been among the most influential and controversial writers of our age. Now the author of more than twenty novels, numerous stories, two memoirs, and two books of literary criticism, Roth has used his writing to continually reinvent himself and in doing so to remake the American literary landscape. This Companion provides the most comprehensive introduction to his works and thought in a collection of newly commissioned essays from distinguished scholars. Beginning with the urgency of Roth's early fiction and extending to the vitality of his most recent novels, these essays trace Roth's artistic engagement with questions about ethnic identity, postmodernism, Israel, the Holocaust, sexuality, and the human psyche itself. With its chronology and guide to further reading, this Companion will be essential for new and returning Roth readers, students and scholars.
Call Number: Miller PS3568.O855 Z617 2007ISBN: 0521864305
Philip Roth : American pastoral, The human stain, The plot against America (2011) by Call Number: Miller PS3568.O855 Z895 2011ISBN: 9780826426314
Philip Roth and the Jews (1996) by
Examines Philip Roth's use of Jewish ideas and materials in his novels, considering also the responses to Roth's work and his relations with the Jewish community and contemporary Jewish writers.
Call Number: Miller PS3568.O855 Z62 1996ISBN: 0791429091
Philip Roth's Rude Truth (2006) by
Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he "worked hard and long and diligently" to be frivolous--an effort that resulted in the notoriously immature Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious "pursuit of the unserious." But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity--an American one that includes Emerson, Melville, and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism. In Philip Roth's Rude Truth--one of the first major studies of Roth's career as a whole--Ross Posnock examines Roth's "mature immaturity" in all its depth and richness. Philip Roth's Rude Truth will force readers to reconsider the narrow categories into which Roth has often been slotted--laureate of Newark, New Jersey; junior partner in the firm Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, and Malamud; Jewish-American regionalist. In dramatic contrast to these caricatures, the Roth who emerges from Posnock's readable and intellectually vibrant study is a great cosmopolitan in the tradition of Henry James and Milan Kundera.
Call Number: Miller PS3568.O855 Z845 2006ISBN: 9780691116044
The Facts: a novelist's autobiography (1988) by
A rigorously unfictionalized narrative that protrays Roth unadorned -- as young artist, as student , as son, as lover, as husband, as American, as Jew -- and candidly examines how close the novels have been to, and how far from, autobiography.
Call Number: Miller PS3568.O855 Z467 1988ISBN: 0374152128
PRIMARY SOURCES: TEXTS
- Philip Roth, The Art of Fiction No. 84 [INTERVIEW]From the Paris Review
American Pastoral (1997) by
American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour "Swede" Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving - and hating - America. It's a book about wanting to belong - and refusing to belong - to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral - a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement - against the indigenous American Berserk.
Call Number: Miller PS3568.O855 A77 1997ISBN: 0395860210
Portnoy's complaint by Call Number: Miller PS3568.O855 P6
The Plot Against America (2004) by
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family -- and for a million such families all over the country -- during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.
Call Number: Miller PS3568.O855 P58 2004ISBN: 0618509283
