Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his novel American Pastoral. He has twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Award. In 2002, he joined the company of William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, and Saul Bellow when he received the prestigious Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Roth has published 27 books, among them: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), When She Was Good (1967), The Counterlife (1986), Patrimony (1991), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1994), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998),
Philip Roth
Articles by Philip Roth
Friday August 3
Everyman
Turning toward the coffin, she picked up a clod of dirt and, before dropping it onto the lid, said lightly, with the air still of a bewildered young girl, “Well, this is how it turns out. There’s nothing more we can do, Dad.” Then she remembered his own stoical maxim from decades back and began to cry. “There’s no remaking reality,” she told him.
Friday August 3
Rereading Saul Bellow
[2000] The Adventures of Augie March (1953) The transformation of the novelist who published Dangling Man in 1944 and The Victim in 1947 into the novelist who published The Adventures of Augie March in ‘53 is revolutionary. Bellow overthrows everything: compositional choices grounded in narrative principles of harmony and order, a novelistic ethos indebted to
Thursday May 31
Acceptance Speech by Philip Roth for the Saul Bellow Award
The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists—William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain of the 20th century. For me as a writer, The Adventures of Augie March, published by Bellow in 1953, remains the most inspiring American novel I have ever read. Nobody