Philip Roth: The Biography
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- Synopsis
- &“I don&’t want you to rehabilitate me,&” Philip Roth said to his only authorized biographer, Blake Bailey. &“Just make me interesting.&” Granted complete independence and access, Bailey spent almost ten years poring over Roth&’s personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and listening to Roth&’s own breathtakingly candid confessions. Cynthia Ozick, in her front-page rave for the New York Times Book Review, described Bailey&’s monumental biography as &“a narrative masterwork … As in a novel, what is seen at first to be casual chance is revealed at last to be a steady and powerfully demanding drive. … under Bailey&’s strong light what remains on the page is one writer&’s life as it was lived, and―almost―as it was felt." Though Roth is generally considered an autobiographical novelist—his alter-egos include not only the Roth-like writer Nathan Zuckerman, but also a recurring character named Philip Roth—relatively little is known about the actual life on which so vast an oeuvre was supposedly based. Bailey reveals a man who, by design, led a highly compartmentalized life: a tireless champion of dissident writers behind the Iron Curtain on the one hand, Roth was also the Mickey Sabbath-like roué who pursued scandalous love affairs and aspired &“[t]o affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaffronted"—the man who was pilloried by his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll&’s House. Towering above it all was Roth&’s achievement: thirty-one books that give us &“the truest picture we have of the way we live now,&” as the poet Mark Strand put it in his remarks for Roth&’s Gold Medal at the 2001 American Academy of Arts and Letters ceremonial. Tracing Roth&’s path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth&’s engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture.
- Copyright:
- 2021
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 912 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9781510769731
- Publisher:
- Skyhorse
- Date of Addition:
- 06/04/21
- Copyrighted By:
- Blake Bailey
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.