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Philip Roth

Biography

Philip Roth

In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for AMERICAN PASTORAL. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 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. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times.

In 2005 THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA received the Society of American Historians’ prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004."

Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award for "a body of work…of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship" and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose "scale of achievement over a sustained career…places him or her in the highest rank of American literature."

Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.

Books by Philip Roth

by Philip Roth - Fiction

 

A young playground director in Newark helplessly witnesses his schoolboy charges fall to a polio outbreak against the backdrop of World War II.

by Philip Roth - Fiction

Philip Roth imagines an alternate version of American history in which Charles Lindbergh is elected President. The heroic aviator and rabid isolationist negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election heralds a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America.