Philip Roth

The Quintessential

Jewish-American Novelist

“The bus, the bus, what intervened on the bus to prevent me from coming all over the sleeping shikse’s arm—I don’t know. Common sense, you think? Common decency? My right mind, as they say, coming to the fore? Well, where is this right mind on that afternoon I came home from school to find my mother out of the house, and our refrigerator stocked with a big purplish piece of raw liver? I believe I have already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast of it, Your Holiness. That—she—it—wasn’t my first piece. My first piece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty—and then had again at the end of a fork, at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.

“So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family’s dinner.”

“To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and

Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop;

Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver.”

Portnoy's Complaint (pôrt’-noiz kəm-plānt’) n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature…

Biography & Literary Accomplishments

• Born March 19, 1933 in Newark, NJ.

• Studied at Weequahic High School—often referenced in his various novels.

• Attends Bucknell College• Pursues graduate studies

at U of Chicago, where he meets Saul Bellow and his first wife, Margaret Martinson.

• Published Goodbye, Columbus to critical acclaim in 1959.

• Followed with incredibly successful Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969.

• He separated from his wife in 1963 after a tumultuous relationship which nevertheless provided ample inspiration.

• Martinson died suddenly in a car crash in 1968.

• Marries Clara Bloom in 1990; they separated in 1994, and she published an unflattering memoir about their marriage in 1996.

• Philip Roth has garnered mutliple literary awards and accolades:

• National Book Critic Circle Awards, PEN/Faulkner Awards, National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prize, Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union, National Medal of the Arts from the White House, W. H. Smith Award for Best Book of the year (twice), American Academy of Arts and Letters: Gold Medal of fiction (given every six years), and more…

• March 2011: Obama awarded Roth the National Humanities Medal

• Nobel Prize…?