Source: "The Sadness of Philip Roth: An Interim Report," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. III, No. 2, Winter, 1962, pp. 259-68.

In the excerpt below, Landis claims that sadness and a yearning for a more meaningful way of life motivate Roth's acerbic portrait of upper-middle class Jewry in his short fiction.

The publication of [Goodbye, Columbus] in 1959 confirmed the already widespread impression left earlier by his stories in the New Yorker and Commentary that a young writer of great vigor and promise had appeared on the scene. Among his reviewers were Saul Bellow, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin. His honors included a National Book Award in 1960 as well as the Daroff Memorial Award of the Jewish Book Council of America, also in 1960, for the best "work of Jewish interest" in fiction. And he and Bernard Malamud have since been frequently coupled as artists of large talents who write...