S. Eliot or the "redskin" mode of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, and notes that in postwar America when "a lot of redskins ... went off to universities and infiltrated the departments of English," they became writers who felt "fundamentally ill-at-ease in, and at odds with both worlds." Roth places himself among these writers, whom he labels "redface," and the result in his work is "a self-conscious and deliberate zigzag," each book "veering sharply away from the one before."
Born to Herman and Besse Finkel Roth in 1933, Philip Roth grew up in a working-class Jewish neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. In this environment he was educated, he says, to be a good, responsible person, "controlled ... by the social regulations of the self-conscious and orderly lower-middle-class neighborhood ... and by the taboos that had been filtered down ...
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