Nathan Zuckerman is one of Roth’s most central characters, and any thorough study of Roth and his work requires an exploration of Zuckerman’s role in Roth’s development as a writer. In many ways, Roth’s career, his concerns, and his confrontation with illness and age, are reflected and refracted through Zuckerman, This chapter addresses the interpretation of Zuckerman as one of Roth’s “alter-egos”, from the time he first appears in 1974 in My Life as a Man, to his role in novels now collected as “Zuckerman Bound” [The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and The Prague Orgy (1985)] to The Counterlife (1986), and then the “American Trilogy”—American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000)—before bidding farewell in 2007’s Exit Ghost.

This first chapter on thel contexts of Roth’s work provides an overview of these responses in Roth’s early years as a published writer, addressing the accolades for works such as Goodbye, Columbus, as well as the pushback early works received from members of the Jewish community, who deemed elements of his early short stories to be anti-Semitic. The chapter also briefly addresses Roth’s output after the largely positive reception of Goodbye, Columbus – namely, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967) – providing an overview of the more mixed reviews received by these works, and Roth’s own struggle to find his voice as a young author.

This chapter will address the place of the “Philip Roth” novels—which include The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), Operation Shylock (1993), and The Plot Against America (2004)—within Roth’s career at large, as well as the critical response to those novels. In addition to being among the most evident examples of Roth’s postmodern techniques, this particular categorization of books is also unique because, unlike Zuckerman and Kepesh, the identity of the character “Philip Roth” himself shifts from book to book. For instance, while the “Philip Roth” of The Plot Against America is a character in Roth’s dystopian alternate history, the “Philip Roth” of The Facts and Patrimony is more closely aligned with Roth the author, adding new levels to his blurring of fact and fiction.

David Kepesh, the protagonist of The Breast (1972), The Professor of Desire (1977), and The Dying Animal (2001), is one such protagonist. This chapter will discuss “The Kepesh novels” as a whole, addressing the benefits and drawbacks of considering these novels as a neatly combined unit, and examining their place within Roth’s body of work as a whole, commenting on what they reveal evolution of his ideas about literature, psychoanalysis, masculinity, and aging.

The last four novels Roth composed prior to his retirement—which include Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis have also been lately grouped together as “Nemeses.” The novels—more accurately deemed novellas, in sharp contrast to hefty tomes likes those collected as “The American Trilogy”—are not grouped together by a common protagonist, but rather by their notable brevity and by common theme: all four deal closely with the subject of mortality.This chapter offers an expanded discussion for the rationale of grouping these novels together (and, as with the other categorizations, the pitfalls of doing so), and will provide an overview of their critical reception and commentary on how they draw upon and depart from Roth’s earlier body of work.