The unconventional autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize–winnning, bestselling author—"the most vigorous and truthful of American writers" (
Newsday
)—who reshaped our idea of fiction. A work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art.
Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the "girl of my dreams" Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by
Goodbye, Columbus;
and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write
Portnoy's Complaint.
The book concludes surprisingly—in true Rothian fashion—with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.