Philip Roth

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American short story writer and novelist
Born: March 19, 1933

the strange places we're from
Roth grew up in Weequahic, a neighborhood in Newark, N.J. For the record, I couldn't pronounce that word if my life depended on it.

known for
Novels that often contain Jewish characters and address issues of importance to American society such as assimilation, Zionism, and anti-Semitism. Also, ribald, unflinching, and absurdist portrayals of sexuality (putting "the id back in yid").

beat this
Two of his novels have won the National Book Award; two others were finalists. Two have won National Book Critics Circle awards; again, another two were finalists. He has also won two PEN/Faulkner Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (American Pastoral). In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Life's rough, eh?

books
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959)
Letting Go (1962)
When She Was Good (1967)
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Our Gang (starring Tricky and his friends) (1971)
The Breast (1972)
The Great American Novel (1973)
My Life As a Man (1974)
The Professor of Desire (1977)
The Ghost Writer (1979)
A Philip Roth Reader (1980)
Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (1985)
The Counterlife (1986)
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
Deception (1990)
Patrimony (1991)
Operation Shylock (1993)
Sabbath's Theater (1995)
American Pastoral (1997)
I Married a Communist (1998)
The Human Stain (2000)
The Dying Animal (2001)
Reading Myself and Others (2001)