Introduction: Roth at mid-career

Summary

The author of more than twenty novels, numerous stories, two memoirs, and two works of literary criticism, Philip Roth has been perhaps the most critically significant and consistently controversial American writer of the past fifty years. Twice Roth has been awarded the National Book Award (1960, 1995), the National Book Critics' Circle Award (1987, 1991), and the PEN/Faulkner Award (1993, 2000). He is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts (1970), the Pulitzer Prize (1997), and France's Medici Foreign Book Prize (2000), among other recognitions. In 2001, Time Magazine named Roth “America's Best Novelist.” Perhaps more telling, the distinguished literary critic Harold Bloom has included more of Roth's novels (six) in his Western Canon than of any other living American author; beginning in 2005, Roth became the third living American author to have his works collected by the Library of America. When Roth was honored with the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2002, his place as a major American author was one that no serious critic would be willing to dispute.

That Roth could become so widely revered by the end of his long and fruitful career seems unlikely when one recalls the controversy with which his career began. His early fiction excited the anger of many Jewish readers who accused him of exploiting Jewish-American culture in order to gain acceptance as an “American” author. Roth's notoriety reached its apex in 1969 with the publication of Portnoy's Complaint (1969).