Philip Roth

Biography

Philip Roth (1933-2018) grew up in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey — the same neighborhood he memorializes in American Pastoral. His father was an insurance salesman, not a glove manufacturer, but the Jewish postwar Newark world Roth depicts is the world of his childhood. He watched that world destroyed by the 1967 Newark riots from the outside — he had left for New York and Connecticut — and carried the loss for decades before making it the setting for his most ambitious novel. He wrote American Pastoral at 64, at the peak of his late-career powers, in what he later called his 'American Trilogy.' He won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1998.

Philip Roth at a glance