Zuckerman Unbound

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.

"It is a) funny, b) sparkling prose, c) to-the-point short, d) genuinely moving. Between two thin covers Roth manages to combine personal sexual satire...and a troubling moral story about his last encounter with his dying father" Financial Times "Zuckerman Unbound is masterful, sure in every touch, as clear and economical of line as a crystal vase" New York Times Book Review "It was bold of Roth to write a novel about being famous...a comic stroll in the hall of mirrors" Newsweek "Fluent, funny" -- Nick Laird Daily Telegraph, Christmas round up "[Roth's] narrative hand is wonderfully sure, his comic timing worthy of the Ritz Brothers... Not since Henry MIller has anyone learned to be as funny and compassionate and brutal and plaintive in the space of a paragraph" Village Voice