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[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 impressive body of fiction that has attracted widespread critical commentary. His ideas and his wit range widely. Like the great satirists of the past, Roth is concerned with serious public and private subjects—genocide, war, the foibles of modern democracies, family life, the individual's inner turmoil, and the writer's imagination and craft. His prolific career has been marked by dualities of low comedy and high seriousness, contributing to his reception by critics and readers as both enfant terrible and literary elder statesman. Roth addressed this contradiction in Reading Myself and Others (1975), admitting that one of his "continuing problems" has been "to find the means to be true to these seemingly inimical realms of experience that I am strongly attached to by temperament and training—the aggressive, the crude, and the obscene, at one extreme, and something a good deal more subtle and, in every sense, refined at the other." He cites Philip Rahv's well-known essay "Paleface and Redskin" (Kenyon Review, Summer 1939), which segregated American writers either in the "paleface" mode of Henry James and T.
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