Philip Roth and the narrow framework of postwar cultural life

By David Walsh
24 May 2018

 [ American fiction writer Philip Roth died May 22 at 85 from congestive heart failure. The author of more than 30 books, Roth retired from writing in 2010.
Among his best-known works are Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Letting Go (1962), Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).
Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey in March 1933 to a Jewish immigrant family. His father was an insurance broker. The future writer attended Bucknell University in Pennsylvania before pursuing graduate studies at the University of Chicago.
His novella Goodbye, Columbus introduced Roth and some of his concerns to the world. A middle-class Jewish boy who works in the Newark public library falls for a girl who attends Radcliffe College and comes from a wealthier, more assimilated Jewish family. The title refers to the attachment the girl’s brother feels to his years at “all-American” Ohio State University. The narrator, in the end, decides this is not the world for him. ]