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...

Spooky storyteller Michael Norman still doesn't know if he believes RUN A WEB search on Michael Norman, and sites like Weird Wisconsin and Aliensonearth.com turn up on the list of matches. Which isn't surprising, since Norman has a book of ghost stories in...

The Ghost Writer One for Sorrow By Christopher Barzak Bantam, 308pp., $12 Christopher Barzak's love lives of dead teenagers BY ELIZABETH HAND One for Sorrow, Christopher Barzak's lovely, melancholy, off beat first novel, affectingly captures the emotional centrifuge that is adolescence,...

EXIT GHOSTBy Philip RothHoughton Mifflin, 304 pages, $26 What to do when the best living American novelist writes a weak book? The New Yorker solved the problem (in the Oct. 1 issue) with an extended Q&A, allowing Hermione Lee to caress the author with feather-soft...

Philip Roth says he's done with Nathan Zuckerman. But is Nathan done with Philip Roth? "Goodbye, Nathan Zuckerman," the headline from Time magazine reads. Roth, the story declares, "has exhausted the possibilities of his character," the fictional adventurer of "The Ghost Writer," "The Anatomy Lesson"...

Interpretative fantasies, from Clarissa and Tristram Shandy to Finnegans Wake, Pale Fire, and Gravity's Rainbow, have traditionally concerned themselves with such problems as "validity," "discursivity," and "reality" vs. "textuality," particularly with the status of fictional texts, their origins, ends, and authoritative power. Philip Roth's recent novel, The Ghost Writer, is part of this tradition: it is about origins, and the problems o...

The Ghost Writer must be initially examined from the context of the Bildungsroman because Roth has so deliberately placed it in this context. After focusing on the novel as a work of fiction within a clearly defined tradition, then the critic can look to the narrative for parallels to the author's life and insights into his growth and development. In comparing the novel with its predecessors we can not only evaluate its departures from that tradition but also assess Roth's implications about t...

Sixty years after Joyce published his [bildungsroman known as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man], its themes sound hackneyed: a youth caught between his vision of the truth and the sentimental, institutionalized beliefs of his elders; the artist escaping from the world of his father through flights of fancy that become fact. To redeem this adolescent fantasy from the storehouse of cultural commonplaces, a writer has just two choices. The serious approach already canonized, Philip Roth applied his comi...