Philip Roth: A Counterlife

This new biography of famed American novelist Philip Roth offers a full account of his development as a writer.Philip Roth was much more than a Jewish writer from Newark as this biography reveals. His life encompassed writing some of the most original novels in American literature, publishing censored writers from Eastern Europe, surviving less than satisfactory marriages, and developing friendships with anumber of the most important writers of his time from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Edna O'Brien. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and the Man Booker International Prize, Roth maintained a remarkable productivity throughout a career thatspanned almost fifty years, creating 31 works. But beneath the success was illness, angst and anxiety often masked from his readers. This new biography, drawing on archives, interviews and his books, delves into the shaded world of Philip Roth to identify the ghosts, the character and even identityof the man.