Philip Roth, influential Jewish writer, Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote about male lust, Jewish life and the United States, died on Tuesday night in New York, at a Manhattan hospital from congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018, according to the New York Times who spoke to one of his close friends. Roth was 85.
“He was an incredibly generous person. Always very demanding, respectful and highly respected by many young authors and many of his contemporaries. He was, in my opinion, a great writer and a great man, and his loss is incalculable, “he said.
Famed American novelist Philip Roth was born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey. Roth graduated from Bucknell University in 1954. Roth was one of the most influential and prolific American novelists of the 20th century, with a long and prolific career. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he won other literary honors such as the National Book Award and Man Booker International and the Prince of Asturias Award.
Roth grew up with his older brother, Sandy, in a Jewish, middle-class family. Roth began his literary career in college. After briefly attending Rutgers University, Roth went on to Bucknell University, where he started up a magazine called Et Cetera. Some of his early short stories were featured in the publication.
After graduating in 1954, Roth spent some time in the U.S. Army. Even as a soldier, he continued to write. He later attended University of Chicago, where he earned a master’s degree in English literature. Proving to be a controversial writer early on, Roth angered a number of Jewish readers with the story “Defender of the Faith,” published in The New Yorker in 1957. “I was suddenly being assailed as an anti-Semite, this thing that I had detested all my life, and a self-hating Jew,” Roth later explained to The New York Times.
In 1959, he won the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus. Roth had his first best-seller with 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Over the years, he has earned many accolades for his work, including a second National Book Award for 1995’s Sabbath’s Theatre and a Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. His later works include Everyman (2006) and Nemesis (2010). Roth died on May 22, 2018 at the age of 85.
“Since the beginning of his long and famous career, the fiction of Philip Roth has explored the human need to demolish, challenge, oppose, separate,” said the Pulitzer Committee when he awarded the prize for “American Pastoral” in 1997.
In 2012, he announced that “Nemesis”, his most recent work published two years before, would be his last novel. He made the decision after reading all his works again.
“I decided I’m done with fiction,” he said at the time. “I do not want to read more, write more and I do not want to talk about it anymore. I no longer feel that dedication to writing that I had experienced all my life. ”
When he retired, he devoted himself to reading, swimming and meeting with friends.
Among his most recognized works are Portnoy’s Complaint, The Professor of Desire, The Human Stain , The Plot Against America , The Humbling and American Pastoral, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Goodbye, Columbus, The conspiracy against America, Everyman and “I Got Married.” with a communist.
The controversial work entitled Portnoy’s Complaint, for which he received the National Book Prize in 1959 created a great sensation due to his explicit description of a young man’s sexuality and his masturbation to free himself from a strict Jewish education.
In a 2014 essay for The New York Times, Roth described his impressions after rereading his fourth work:
“After reading ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ 45 years later, I am impressed and satisfied: impressed that I was so reckless, glad I was so reckless,” he wrote. “Certainly, while I was writing, I did not understand that I would not get rid of this psychoanalytic patient whom I called Alexander Portnoy. In fact, I was about to change my identity to his. ”
Roth described the protagonist as a “man possessed by dangerous sensations, unpleasant opinions, wild grievances, sinister feelings and … beset by the implacable presence of lust.”
With information from The Biography.com website.
https://www.biography.com/people/philip-roth-9465081