EVERYMAN - Scarce Pristine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing

Roth, Philip

ISBN 10: 061873516X / ISBN 13: 9780618735167

Published by New York City, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2006, 2006

About this Item

1st Printing. 182 pages. Published in 2006. The author's twenty-fourth novel. Now considered a contemporary classic. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Philip Roth's "Everyman". The first in Philip Roth's "Nemeses" cycle of short novels, which includes "Indignation" (2008), "The Humbling" (2009), and "Nemesis" (2010). "A slim but dense volume about a sickly boy who grows up obsessed with his and everybody else's health, and eventually dies in his 70's, just as he always said he would. It might remind you of the old joke about the hypochondriac who ordered his tombstone to read: 'I told you I was sick'. Through it all, there's that Roth-ian voice: Pained, angry, arrogant, and deeply, wryly funny. Nothing escapes him, not even his own self-seriousness" (Sara Nelson). When asked why he is so prolific, Roth famously replied, "I am a writer. I write". He echoes this artisanal ethic beautifully in the book: "Amateurs look for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work" (Philip Roth). Philip Roth died on May 22, 2018 of congestive heart failure, literally of heartbreak, at the age of 85. An absolute "must-have" title for Philip Roth collectors. This title is a contemporary classic. This is one of few copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A scarce copy thus. Six of Philip Roth's novels were selected as among the Top 20 works of American fiction of the last 25 years: "American Pastoral", "The Counterlife", "Operation Shylock", "Sabbath's Theater", "The Human Stain", and "The Plot Against America". One of the greatest writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER PHILIP ROTH TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 061873516X. Seller Inventory # 17689

Bibliographic Details

Title: EVERYMAN - Scarce Pristine Copy of The First...

Publisher: New York City, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2006

Publication Date: 2006

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: As New

Dust Jacket Condition: As New

Signed: no

Edition: 1st Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.

The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.

A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be.

The terrain of this powerful novel -- Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century -- is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.

About the Author:

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.