In the following essay, Milowitz examines Roth's treatment of the Holocaust in such works as The Professor of Desire, The Prague Orgy, Deception, Operation Shylock, and others.

In the following essay, Royal argues that The Counterlife is Roth's most pivotal novel and marks the starting point for his exploration of a postmodern Jewish identity.

In the following essay, Greenberg examines the theme of transgression in Philip Roth's work, contending that the author's techniques are uniquely reflective of his relationship with mainstream American media and literary activity.

Source: "Writing about Jews," in Commentary, Vol. 36, No. 6, December, 1963, pp. 446-52. In the following essay, Roth defends his portrayals of Jewish Americans in his short fiction, specifically in "Epstein" and "Defender of the Faith," arguing that he writes about individual values and vices rather than those of the larger community.

Source: "Good Girls and Boys Gone Bad," in Philip Roth, Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1981, pp. 9-85. In the following excerpt, Jones and Nance examine the themes connecting Goodbye, Columbus, "Epstein, " "Conversion of the Jews, " and "Eli, the Fanatic. "

Source: "Nice Jewish Boys: The Comedy of Goodbye, Columbus and the Early Stories," in Philip Roth Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 13-36. In the following excerpt, Halio explores the dark humor present in each of Goodbye, Columbus 's five short stories.

In the following essay, Krupnick places Roth within the tradition of Jewish-American autobiographies.

Source: "Love and Identity: Neil Klugman's Quest in Goodbye, Columbus," in English Studies, Vol. 68, No. 1, February, 1987, pp. 79-88. In the following excerpted essay, Nilsen argues that protagonist Neil Klugman in Roth 's Goodbye, Columbus, separates from his lover to affirm his own identity.

[As] an artist Roth has placed his faith in Realism, not Judaism…. [From] the wider perspective available when the ethnic emphasis is set aside for a while, Roth's career is not marked by a vagrant choice of subjects but by a single-minded dedication to a significant goal: finding subjects and techniques which will reveal the effect of the interpenetration of reality and fantasy in the lives of his representative Americans. This concern is what makes an aesthetically coherent whole of his othe...

In the following essay, Duban explores connections between Roth's story “Eli, the Fanatic” and Nathaniel Hawthorne's “The Minister's Black Veil.”

In the following essay, Shechner assesses Roth's influence on his own literary outlook.

Source: "Philip Roth Reconsidered," in Commentary, Vol. 54, No. 6, December, 1972, pp. 69-77. In his reconsideration of Goodbye, Columbus, Howe maintains that Roth's short fiction is limited by his willful shaping of the text.

Philip Roth is a singular figure in recent American fiction: he is a social realist who adamantly refuses to withdraw from the field, even though he sees around him no smiling aspects of American life. Taking as his domain the recognizable present, Roth has been the most prolific—and the most controversial—writer in America in the last decade and a half. His immense popularity in the universities and the marketplace has raised appreciative eyebrows and elicited cries of outrage, in some cases ...

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.

Source: "The Fiction of Philip Roth: An Introduction," in The Fiction of Philip Roth, Haddonfield House, 1974, pp. 1-36. In the following excerpt, McDaniel compares one of Roth's earlier works, "The Contest for Aaron Gold, " with a more recent piece, "I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting': Or, Looking at Kafka, " to demonstrate thematic and artistic consistencies in Roth's short fiction.

There is, as the folks in the head trades might say, a lot of rage in Philip Roth. What, one wonders, is he so angry about? As a writer, he seems to have had a pretty good roll of the dice. His first book, the collection of stories entitled Goodbye, Columbus, published when he was twenty-six, was a very great critical success; in brilliance, his literary debut was second in modern America perhaps only to that of Delmore Schwartz…. After two further novels, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (196...

Source: "The Swamp of Prosperity," in Commentary, Vol. 28, No. 1, July 1959, pp. 77-9. In the following excerpted review of Goodbye, Columbus, Bellow announces the arrival of a talented writer, accurate in his understanding of contemporary American Jewry, though excessively wry in his handling of the material.

When Zuckerman Unbound appeared two years ago, it was widely assumed to be Nathan's farewell to his past and Philip Roth's farewell to his alter ego Nathan. But Roth had a trilogy in mind. As The Anatomy Lesson demonstrates, Nathan's problems were just beginning. During the next four years, his self-esteem withered under one assault after another until he no longer knew if his talent was still intact. The death of his mother left him mourning over unfinished business; his brother blamed...

Nathan Zuckerman, thrice-married son of a foot doctor, is not just a novelist who likes to quote Flaubert and invoke the powers of Art. No, as Philip Roth intimates in the title of his new novel, Zuckerman Unbound, Nathan has a great mythological predecessor, Prometheus, whose own story was told by Aeschylus in a similarly titled tale. Zuckerman, of course, does nothing so dramatic as stealing fire from Zeus for the benefit of human civilization. All he does is write a book. In fact, as we know from Roth&#x...

Source: "Tough-minded Mr. Roth," in Contemporaries, Little, Brown and Company, 1962, pp. 258-62. In the following favorable review of Goodbye, Columbus, which was originally published in Reporter on May 28, 1959, Kazin commends Roth's innovative presentation of the Jew as an individual, particularly in the title novella .

Roth seems to me the most gifted novelist now writing, at least if one puts a stress on tradition in using the word novelist. He translates his intelligence and his feelings into the terms specific to serious fiction, with more firmness than Bellow, more richness than Mailer, more patience and steadiness and taste and tact than anyone else…. [Roth's] stories are full of beautiful insights into books and authors, into the business of teaching and criticizing, and into living with works of liter...

Source: "The Suburbs of Babylon," in The New Republic, Vol. 140, No. 24, June 15, 1959, pp. 17-18. In the following review of Goodbye, Columbus, Howe supports Roth 's characterization of suburban Jewry but disapproves of his moral pointedness .

Whatever else a story may do, its one indispensable element is the imagination's first premise: what if?… What if a petty clerk in Prague should awaken one morning to find that he has become an enormous insect, or what if Franz Kafka himself should survive his bout with tuberculosis in 1924, live long enough to have to flee the Nazis, and emigrate to Newark, N.J., just in time to become Philip Roth's Hebrew schoolteacher? Such is the premise of what is surely Roth's finest piece ...

Philip Roth, recalling a visit to Prague in 1971, said he was struck by the contrasting situation of writers in a country that is not free and in the United States. Here, it seemed to him, "everything goes and nothing matters"; there, "nothing goes and everything matters." It is this concern that seems to underline the trilogy that Roth began with "The Ghost Writer," continued with "Zuckerman Unbound" and now concludes with "The Anatomy Lesson.&...

[The Anatomy Lesson] is the finest, boldest and funniest piece of fiction which Philip Roth has yet produced—and that is quite something to say about the author of Portnoy's Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go. Perhaps because of the 'personal' nature of most of his work—and also perhaps simply because he is one of the half-dozen writers alive who make you laugh aloud—readers and some critics in this country have tended to underestimate the scale and nature ...

If it were only a matter of wit and intellect, Philip Roth's position as one of the masters of American fiction would be unquestioned. But egged on by some perverse internal logic, he has since Portnoy's Complaint usually resorted to the tactics of a schoolboy: playing pranks, defying conventions, alternately revering and mocking his elders, and scandalizing his peers. His new short novel, Zuckerman Unbound, is another extravagant complaint, this time putting the blame on fame, though certainl...

Prometheus remains the quintessential rebel-hero, the mythological figure who defied Zeus, stole the secret of fire from Hephaestus, and gave it to mankind. For that liberating act, he was punished—chained to a rock where an eagle pecked away at his liver. Nathan Zuckerman is a paler post-Modernist version. He defied the American Jewish community, exposed its dirty little secrets and then blabbed the whole business in public—i.e. Gentile—print. For that liberating (?) aesthetic act, he ...

It's remarkable that Bellow, Styron, Malamud and Roth have all written novels in which the central character is a writer, more or less closely identifiable with the author whose name appears on the title-page. It's also rather interesting, to my mind, that all these writers are men; while they write about their problems as writers, women writers write about their problems as women. The American public, undeniably, receives these confessions with fascinated appetite, but it isn't axiomat...

Source: "The Image of Newark and the Indignities of Love: Notes on Philip Roth," in Midstream, Vol. V, No. 3, Summer, 1959, pp. 96-9. In the following assessment of Goodbye, Columbus, Fiedler maintains that the title novella's "slovenliness" makes it superior to the book's remaining short fiction.

Is Zuckerman Unbound a success? The answer, unfortunately, is no. What Roth has always done well, he does as scintillatingly as ever. His dialogue rings true; his prose is crystalline. His talent for the outrageous flourish is as devastating as ever…. If nothing else, Zuckerman Unbound is dependably funny. As deftly as any other writer, Roth can also capture a sense of psychic claustrophobia, the feeling of being trapped because one is a member of a family, or a success, or a Jew. Perfect strangers, ...

[Zuckerman Unbound, avowedly a sequel to The Ghost Writer, is] in many ways a repetition which moves to a similar conclusion. It would seem that not only is Roth obsessed with the relationship of art to life, but particularly obsessed with the relationship between art (or the life he writes) and life (the life he actually experienced and remembered)—how much is transformation (art) and how much is mere transcription (betrayal)? I say "Roth" but, in line with this whole problem, he can s...

[In Zuckerman Unbound Roth] doesn't do much with the novel's main theme, which is, or should be, what it's like to be famous. The book veers off from this into some family matters—[Nathan Zuckerman's] fruitless attempt to win back the wife he's walked out on, the death of his father—which give the feeling of not being integral to any true narrative but rather devised to make up the appearance of one. Roth seems to me to be fulfilling an obligation to write an...

In "The Anatomy Lesson"—Philip Roth's rich, satisfyingly complex conclusion to his Zuckerman trilogy, of which "The Ghost Writer" and "Zuckerman Unbound" formed the first two parts—the writer Nathan Zuckerman has a pain…. It is a pain that has forced Zuckerman to give up writing and spend most of his time lying on the floor in his apartment on a play mat….

"Zuckerman Unbound" is about a young Jewish novelist rather like Philip Roth who has just published a wildly successful book called "Carnovsky," which is rather like "Portnoy's Complaint." It's a fine idea: it gives Philip Roth an opportunity to play with celebrity, writers and readers, truth and fiction…. [Nathan Zuckerman, the young Jewish novelist, finds that like] his book, he has become everybody's property….

["I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting, or, Looking at Kafka"] is a masterful example of comedy. Roth uses cliché and fantasy, movies and spiritual longing, documentary and imagination, to construct a work which refuses to sit still. It is a dream-like marriage of opposing tendencies, texts, and "worlds," and in its striking way, it brings us closer to Roth's own life and style. But the piece tells us much about the comic process. I believe that Roth implies a u...

Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson is a pugnacious rebel and one can well imagine his railing at God and waving a banner saying 'Unfair to Zuckerman!'. Indeed, the polemics in Philip Roth's third Zuckerman book are among its most effective passages…. Roth is at his best complaining, as he has shown in Portnoy's Complaint and, indeed, in most of his fiction. He—and one cannot help thinking of the 'he' as a composite character, Philip Nathan Roth Zuckerman&...