Everyman

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood 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 aged eighty-five on 22 May 2018, six years after retiring from writing.

"Roth's writing looks uncompromisingly straightforward but is subtle and clever... A human story for our times" -- A. S. Byatt New Statesman "The genius of this short, bleak, remarkable novel stems from the way that Roth turns his desolate assessment of death into something bracing: an angry acceptance that mortality is the price we pay for the sheer wonder of this thing called life" -- Douglas Kennedy The Times "This elegant little book shimmers with the mysteries and regrets of a whole life...poignant, droll, and eloquent" -- Lionel Shriver Daily Telegraph "Alive with literary brilliance for all its deathly subject matter" -- Peter Kemp Sunday Times "Every sentence and every paragraph works with the coiled precision of the watch mechanisms that the narrators father repairs and glitters with the lapidary perfection of the perfection he sells" -- Tim Martin Independent on Sunday