Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

A critical evaluation of Philip Roth—the first of its kind—that takes on the man, the myth, and the work.

Philip Roth is one of the most renowned writers of our time. From his debut, Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960, and the explosion of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 to his haunting reimagining of Anne Frank's story in The Ghost Writer ten years later and the series of masterworks starting in the mid-eighties— The Counterlife, Patrimony, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, The Human Stain—Roth has produced some of the great American literature of the modern era. Roth Unbound explores this great writer through his art, offering a wealth of previously undisclosed biographical details and previously unpublished material.

Claudia Roth Pierpont, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has known Roth for nearly a decade. Her carefully researched and gracefully written account is filled with remarks from Roth himself, drawn from their ongoing conversations. Here are insights and anecdotes that will change the way many readers perceive this most controversial and galvanizing writer: a young and unhappily married Roth struggling to write; a wildly successful Roth, after the uproar over Portnoy, working to help writers from Eastern Europe and to get their books known in the West; Roth responding to the early, Jewish—and the later, feminist—attacks on his work. Here are Roth's family, his inspirations, his critics, the full range of his fiction, and his friendships with such figures as Saul Bellow and John Updike.

Roth Unbound helps us make sense of one of the most vital literary careers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.