The Professor of Desire

Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism * Milan Kundera *
A thoughtful, even gentle, stylistically elegant novel about the paradox of male desire, that lacerating passion which may lead to happiness but cannot survive it * New York Times Book Review *
He writes so well. His prose is both elegant and furious. It can be witty, tender and brutal in a single paragraph – Melvyn Bragg
No one writing can juggle the somber and the ludicrous more adroitly than Roth * The Time *
A profound and commanding book… There is great beauty in it, humanity and tenderness * Sunday Telegraph *
Undoubtedly a fine and rewarding novel * Spectator *
There are few writers around who can write about passion so elegantly and so entertainingly as Roth * Washington Post *

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on March 19, 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighborhood his writing returned to time and again.

Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997), which won the Pulitzer Prize.

Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Roth died at the age of eighty-five on May 22, 2018, six years after retiring from writing.

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