by Blake Bailey
First published 2021
Philip Roth chose Blake Bailey to tell his story, then opened every door. Bailey spent years in Roth's personal papers, tracking down former lovers and literary rivals, recording hours of unguarded conversations with the author himself. The biography follows Roth's rise from his Newark Jewish upbringing to become one of America's most celebrated and controversial writers. Bailey documents how a disastrous first marriage nearly destroyed Roth's early career, examines his competitive relationships with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and William Styron, and reveals the complexities of his long romance with actress Claire Bloom, who later attacked him publicly in her own memoir. The book traces Roth's literary evolution from his realistic early novels through the comic excess of Portnoy's Complaint to the ambitious scope of his American Trilogy. Bailey shows how Roth engaged with every major cultural shift in postwar America while supporting banned writers in Eastern Europe. Readers get an unvarnished look at both the private man and the literary scene that shaped him.
Genres: biography, literature, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, american, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: literary-rivalry, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Newark, United States
Period: 20th Century, 21st Century, Postwar America
912 pages · Hardcover · W. W. Norton & Company