PHILIP ROTH

The life of a self-described “unchaste monk.”

In 1969, the Washington Post predicted that, for a long time, “we will judge our friends by what they say” about Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint. Roth’s fortunes have oscillated over the past half-century, and Zipperstein’s well-modulated and immensely erudite biography of Roth charts the sine wave of his reputation. A scholar at Stanford University, Zipperstein tells the story of a writer through his books—a feat possible because Roth figured himself and his acquaintances through the many personae of his fictions. Against these representations, Zipperstein arrays a range of documents, interviews, personal encounters, and literary criticism. Roth emerges here less as the magnificently libidinous creature of Blake Bailey’s flamboyant (and discredited) biography than as a writer of social intellectualism. Roth’s major questions are those of this book: What is the place of the immigrant in American society; how does the literature of the past shape our behavior in the present; is there a moral center to modern life; how does the writer draw on personal experience to create vivid character? Zipperstein’s Roth is a writer largely concerned with the books he has read, and a high point of this biography is the sensitive reading of The Ghost Writer as a book about the books that make us. Zipperstein does not shy away from chronicling Roth’s escapades and transgressions. And he does not shy away from calling out the good (Portnoy’s Complaint, The Ghost Writer, The Plot Against America), the bad (When She Was Good, The Professor of Desire), and the simply god-awful (The Breast). Written with measured, scholarly detachment and rich with original research, this biography will introduce Roth to new readers as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century and one of the most influential voices in shaping American Jewish identity.

A thoughtful telling of Roth’s literary life, shorn of sensationalism, by a leading historian of Jewish culture.