The Anatomy Lesson

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral—and one of the most renowned writers of the twentieth century—”a ferocious, heartfelt book” (The New Yorker) featuring Nathan Zuckerman whose life is about to unravel when he comes down with a mysterious affliction.

"Roth has a genius for the comedy of entrapment.... [He] writes America's most raucously funny novels." —Time

At forty, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a terrible pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain can have been caused by his own books. And while he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers grows into an addiction to vodka, marijuana, and Percodan.

The Anatomy Lesson is a great comedy of illness written in what the English critic Hermione Lee has described as "a manner at once ... brash and thoughtful ... lyrical and wry, which projects through comic expostulations and confessions...a knowing, humane authority." The Anatomy Lesson provides some of the funniest scenes in all of Roth's fiction as well as some of the fiercest.

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. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He 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.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.