Who

One of America's most respected novelists, Roth has written more than 25 books including Portnoy's Complaint, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America.

Backstory

Born to Austro-Hungarian Jews in Newark, Roth attended Bucknell and the University of Chicago and served in the army for two years before publishing his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, which won the 1960 National Book Award. Two more novels followed, but it was his fourth book, 1969's Portnoy's Complaint—the story of 33-year-old Alexander Portnoy, who recounts from the psychiatrist's couch his adolescent obsession with masturbation, his warped attitude toward women, and his claustrophobic relationship with his mother—that became a number one bestseller and heralded major acclaim and notoriety. (Richard Benjamin played Portnoy in the movie version.) Roth has since published over 20 novels, including American Pastoral (1997), The Human Stain (2000), The Plot Against America (2004), Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost (2007), the ninth and last novel featuring his most famous alter ego Nathan Zuckerman.

Of note

Roth has possibly the most crowded trophy case of any living American novelist. His numerous awards and accolades include a Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral and two PEN/Faulkner awards; in 2006 The Library of America began publishing the eight-volume collected works of Roth, making him the only living author with that honor. Roth's work, which has generated volumes of critical analysis, uses recurring Jewish male protagonists as authorial alter-egos, most famously Nathan Zuckerman (who narrates nine novels including The Ghost Writer and The Human Stain); David Kapesh, who appears in several novels including The Professor of Desire and The Dying Animal; and a character actually named Philip Roth who was most recently featured in A Plot Against America. And yet despite the preponderance of Jewish characters and themes in his works, Roth rejects the designation "Jewish novelist": "Those kinds of considerations are newspaper clichés. Jewish literature. Black literature. Everyone who opens a book enters the story without noticing these labels."

For the record

Roth has long been repped by uber-agent Andrew Wylie and until 1989 almost all of his work had been published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. That changed when Wylie named a $2 million price for his client's next three books and FSG demurred. Rumors abounded that Roth had demanded the amount after he'd heard that FSG had paid $7 million for Tom Wolfe's next novel; FSG founder Roger Straus later equated the dispute to "penis envy," saying that "Philip is someone for whom the whole symbol of the penis has been important throughout his career." Roth's most recent books have been published by Houghton Mifflin.

Personal

Roth has been married twice, the first time in 1959 to Margaret Martinson, who died in 1968, after they had separated (he wrote about it in his 1974 novel My Life as a Man). In 1990, he married his longtime partner, British actress Claire Bloom. They divorced in 1994, and Bloom wrote an autobiography, Leaving the Doll's House (1996), a large part of which was devoted to exposing Roth as a sadistic, vain, manipulative monster, or as she put it, a "game-playing, Machiavellian strategist." He returned the favor with a pointed depiction of Bloom as Eva Frame, the evil, anti-Semitic wife in I Married a Communist (1998). Roth lives in Warren, Connecticut but is often seen sipping vodka at the Russian Samovar in Midtown.

No joke

Roth refuses to smile in photos: "Why smile into a camera? It makes no human sense."