Philip Roth: The Biography

ISBN: 039324072X

Author: Bailey, Blake

Condition: New

New York Times BestsellerThe renowned biographers definitive portrait of a literary titan.Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roths personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the postwar literary scene.Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain.Bailey examines Roths rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Dolls House.Tracing Roths path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roths engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture. 100 photographs