Born in Newark, New Jersey, Philip Roth's early childhood was scarred by the Depression and he came of age during the paranoid years of the McCarthy era when the Cold War intensified alarmingly. This period is well described in his novel I Married a Communist (1998). Roth was educated at Rutgers and Chicago University, and in the 1960s taught English at Chicago, Iowa, and various other universities.Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Roth's first published work, consists of a collection of satirical stories of American Jewish life that won him the1960 National Book Award in fiction. This was followed by a novel, Letting Go (1962), about a young Jewish academic torn between emotion and reason. His third novel, Portnoy's Complaint (1969), brought him fame and controversy with its explicit description of the sexual problems and experiences of a young Jewish man burdened with a domineering and possessive mother. It also earned him the condemnation of sections of the Jewish community.
With The Ghost Writer (1979), Roth deploys a character, the aspiring young writer Nathan Zuckerman, as a kind of fictional alter ego. The life and career of this figure is developed in Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983). A fourth novel in the series, The Counterlife (1986), continues the Zuckerman story, which reaches the present in his most recent novel, The Human Stain. In 1991, a memoir of his family, Patrimony, was published which won the 1992 National Critics Circle Award. In Operation Shylock (1993), Roth encounters a doppelganger, a man who claims to be the author.
Some critics have suggested that Roth writes not so much about the Jewish but the American experience. The theme of becoming American is central to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral (1997), describing the tragic life of Swede Levov, a "white Jew", and his terrorist daughter.
The cultural and personal self-hatred of his characters may reflect the Jewish quest for a new identity in the United States, and many of Roth's novels are at least as much concerned with political as with sexual themes.
