Philip Roth, seminal author of comical and simmering discontents, dies at 85
Philip Roth, whose sexually scandalous comic novel “Portnoy’s Complaint” brought him literary celebrity after its publication in 1969 and who was eventually hailed as one of America’s greatest living authors for the blunt force and controlled fury of his dozens of later works, died May 22 at 85.
His literary agent, Andrew Wylie, confirmed the death to the Associated Press and said the cause was congestive heart failure. No other details were immediately available.
Mr. Roth’s 1959 debut story collection, “Goodbye, Columbus,” earned him the first of two National Book Awards. He would go on to publish 27 novels, two memoirs and several more story collections by the time he publicly retired from writing in 2012. His lifelong themes included sex and desire, health and mortality, and Jewishness and its obligations — arguably his most definitive subject, given the controversy surrounding his earliest works.
In later years, his focus shifted more frankly to the nation and its discontents, from the rise of Richard Nixon as a political figure in the early Cold War era to the sideshow of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in what became known as Mr. Roth’s “American Trilogy”: “American Pastoral” (1997), “I Married a Communist” (1998) and “The Human Stain” (2000).
"He at once talked about America and American-ness, but filtered it through the history of the 20th century at large,” said Aimee Pozorski, an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University who had written extensively about Mr. Roth.
“He wrote about the American response to the Holocaust, but also about its effects in Israel and Central and Eastern Europe,” Pozorski said. “He talked about the spread of, and simultaneous fear of, communism in the U.S. but also considered cultural shifts in Prague during that time. He could write about these international issues because he was truly cosmopolitan, a global citizen who was grounded by American culture.”
She called Mr. Roth “the voice of his generation.”
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