Exit Ghost

There are few writers who write with such power of the loss of powers * Times Literary Supplement *If its subject embraces mortality, its sentences ring with vitality, and Roth reminds us why “the transforming exigencies of prose fiction” still matter even as the light begins to die * Mail on Sunday *Taken together the Zuckermam novels read as both a noisy New Jersey Kaddish for 50 years of American History and an extraordinary contemporary “Song of Myself” * New Statesman *At his best, Philip Roth constructs his novels from huge blocks of material, to produce an effect that is overpowering * Observer *Here is a noble revelation of the curel vulnerability of the body we live in without choice * Times Literary Supplement *Consistently enthralling…full of tart humour and dancing intelligence * Literary Review *Nobody who has followed him - one of the great writers of our time - thus far, should miss it * Scotsman *A great book, a necessary book * Sunday Herald *There is something magnificent about Philip Roth’s undimmed rage and life-lust… As a body of work, these novels may have changed the way that readers think about their own mortality and may also have enlarged their sense of what it means to be a man; and one hopes that even E.I. Lonoff might consider that a fair tribute to the power of art * Sunday Telegraph *This is a book about the importance of literature that lasts * Telegraph *

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.

In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus - a collection of stories, and a novella - for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America’s finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Roth’s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.

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