SOURCE: Krupnick, Mark. “Jewish Autobiographies and the Counter-Example of Philip Roth.” In American Literary Dimensions, edited by Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio, pp. 155-67. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1999.

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

Like so many other writers in America, Jewish novelists have often derived inspiration from their own lives. Who can read about Henry Roth's David Schearl or Bellow's Herzog or Grace Paley's Faith Darwin or Philip Roth's Zuckerman or Cynthia Ozick's Puttermesser without seeing that their creators have put a lot of themselves into these fictional characters? And yet we know that Ozick is not Puttermesser, or we know at least that Puttermesser isn't all there is to Ozick. The author is able to stand apart from her creation and be funny about her—and subsume her in her own creative fantasies and artistic compositions...