Roth Unbound: a Writer and His Books

A critical evaluation of Philip Roth?the first of its kind?that takes on the man, the myth, and the work

Philip Roth is one of the most renowned writers of our time. From his debut, Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960, and the explosion of Portnoy?s Complaint in 1969 to his haunting reimagining of Anne Frank?s story in The Ghost Writer ten years later and the series of masterworks starting in the mid-eighties?The Counterlife, Patrimony, Operation Shylock, Sabbath?s Theater, American Pastoral, The Human Stain?Roth has produced some of the great American literature of the modern era. And yet there has been no major critical work about him until now.
     Here, at last, is the story of Roth?s creative life. Roth Unbound is not a biography?though it contains a wealth of previously undisclosed biographical details and unpublished material?but something ultimately more rewarding: the exploration of a great writer through his art.
     Claudia Roth Pierpont, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has known Roth for nearly a decade.Her carefully researched and gracefully written accountis filled with remarks from Roth himself,drawn from their ongoing conversations. Here areinsights and anecdotes that will change the waymany readers perceive this most controversial andgalvanizing writer: a young and unhappily marriedRoth struggling to write; a wildly successful Roth,after the uproar over Portnoy, working to help writersfrom Eastern Europe and to get their books knownin the West; Roth responding to the early, Jewish?and the later, feminist?attacks on his work. Hereare Roth?s family, his inspirations, his critics, thefull range of his fiction, and his friendships with such figures as Saul Bellow and John Updike. Hereis Roth at work and at play.
     Roth Unbound is a major achievement?a highly readable story that helps us make sense of one of the most vital literary careers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.