Biography:

Philip Roth was a prolific, comic novelist, short story writer, and pre-eminent figure in 20th-century literature. Roth was born March 19th, 1993, in Newark NJ to second-generation Jewish American parents. Roth’s fathers parents came from Austria and his mother’s ancestors were from the region of Kyiv in Ukraine. Roth grew up at 81 Summit Ave in the Weequahic neighborhood, and he graduated from Weequahic High School around 1950. Roth attended Rutgers University in Newark for a year and then transferred to Bucknell University in PA, where he earned his bachelor’s in English and was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago, where he earned his MA in English literature in 1955. He also briefly worked as an instructor in the university’s writing program. Roth’s fiction, regularly set in his birthplace of Newark, NJ, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its sensual, ingenious style, and for its provocative explorations of American identity. Margaret Martinson became Roth’s first wife in 1959. They separated in 1963 and Martinson died in a car crash in 1968 that significantly impacted Roth. In 1990, Roth married English actress Claire Bloom, whom he had been living with since 1976. They were later divorced in 1994. Roth died of congestive heart failure on May 22nd, 2018, in Manhattan NY.

Link to audio of Reading: https://shu.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_fe814ba9-93f3-4a08-93c6-af61b754af0d/

Link to Gallery of Programs: https://shu.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_6edaa125-2a93-4220-b41f-b15b8a3ac65d/?view=gallery

Pictured: Philip Roth. Born 19 March 1933, Newark, New Jersey. Died 22 May 2018 (aged 85).

List of Notable Works:

• Goodbye Columbus (1959)
• Letting Go (1962)
• When She Was Good (1967)
• Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
• Our Gang (1971)
• The Breast (1972)
• The Ghost Writer (1979)
• Patrimony: A True Story (1991)
• Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
• The American Pastoral (1997)
• I Married a Communist (1998)
• The Dying Animal (2001)
• The Plot Against America (2004)

List of Notable Awards:

• 1997 received Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral 
• 2000 awarded the United Kingdom’s WH Smith Literary Award for best book of the year for The Human Stain 
• 2001 received Franz Kafka Prize