Philip Roth at 80: A Celebration: A Library of America Special Publication

Philip Roth

Oct 2014 · Library of America

About this ebook

On March 19, 2013, a distinguished group of writers and critics gathered at the Newark Museum’s Billy Johnson Auditorium in Newark, New Jersey, to celebrate the extraordinary career and lasting literary legacy of Philip Roth on the occasion of his 80th birthday. This keepsake volume gathers remarks from the evening’s speakers, a fitting tribute to the only living novelist whose work is collected in the Library of America series. Here you’ll find Jonathan Lethem, hilariously recounting his first consciousness-raising encounter with Roth’s work through the Kafkaesque novel The Breast; Hermione Lee, tracing the Shakespearian themes in Roth’s books, from Portnoy’s Complaint to The Humbling; Alain Finkielkraut, offering a deep reading of Roth’s final novel, Nemesis; Claudia Roth Pierpont, assessing Roth’s portrayal of women in such books as Sabbath’s Theater and The Human Stain; Edna O’Brien, recalling her long friendship with Roth; and the author himself, offering a quintessentially Rothian valediction.

About the author

In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral and in 2002 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. His collected works have been published in a definitive ten-volume edition by the Library of America.