Philip Roth (March 19, 1933-May 22, 2018) was born in Newark, New Jersey to insurance broker Herman Roth and his wife Bess Finkel, who were both children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Roth graduated in 1950 from Weequahic High School, as did his fictional Alexander Portnoy in his 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint.
He went on to Rutgers University, then transferred to Bucknell University, graduating magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and next went to the University of Chicago, where he earned a master’s degree in English literature. He became a University of Pennsylvania faculty member, where he taught comparative literature.
Roth’s first book, Goodbye Columbus, contained a novella of the same name and five additional short stories. Some stories dealt with the emergence from the ghettoized world of Jewish immigrants into the assimilated world of second-and third-generation American Jews. It won the 1960 National Book Award for fiction. Two years later, he published Letting Go, a full-length novel, and five years after that, When She Was Good, based on the life of his first wife Margaret Martinson Williams, whom Roth had married in 1959.
Portnoy’s Complaint was Roth’s fourth novel and most controversial because of its frank treatment of sexual subjects, including masturbation. Roth became more prolific thereafter, knocking out 26 additional works through 2010, the most notable of which was the 1997 novel American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It told of a star athlete whose daughter becomes a domestic terrorist during the late 1960s.
Roth and his first wife separated in 1963, and she was killed five years later in a car crash. His second wife was Claire Bloom, the English actress who previously had been married to actor Rod Steiger. That marriage lasted from 1990 through 1994. Roth was an atheist who forbade any religious rituals during his 2018 burial at the Bard College Cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson.
Tomorrow, March 20: Yigael Yadin
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