The American author Philip Roth (born 1933) used his Jewish upbringing and his college days for the basis of many of his novels and other works. Roth used his experiences in growing up in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, and his days as a col...

[This entry was updated by S. Lillian Kremer (Kansas State University) from her entry in DLB 173: American Novelists Since World War II, Fifth Series, pp. 202-234.] A major writer of twentieth-century American literature, Philip Roth has produced an impr...

In 1973, Philip Roth wrote a satirical novel about baseball which he entitled The Great American Novel. The title refers to the parodies of a number of classic American novels in the book, but it also may be an answer to critics who keep waiting for him...

The Counterlife By Philip RothFarrar Straus Giroux. 324 pp. $18.95. FOR HIS LATEST novel, Philip Rothhas descended into the murky arena of daydreams, the underworld of narrative, a place usually brushed aside in the rush of action and speech, unraveled by...

Uh oh. Five minutes into the interview and Philip Roth is already annoyed, sitting very straight in his hotel suite chair and growing tense around the mouth. "Where to begin to answer that question," he says coolly. From beneath the emphatic brows fly signals...

Commentary on the new Philip Roth novel (see page C18) has ranged from the ecstatic (in Newsweek, David Gates declared Exit Ghost “an ideal farewell” to Nathan Zuckerman—“at this point, Roth is everybody’s daddy”) to the lethal (Christopher Hitchens, in The Atlantic Monthly, airs the...