Understanding Philip Roth

A panoramic and accessible guide to one of the most celebrated―and controversial―authors of the twentieth century

Philip Roth was one of the most prominent, controversial, and prolific American writers of his generation. By the time of his death in 2018, he had won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, and three PEN/Faulkner Awards. In Understanding Philip Roth, Matthew A. Shipe provides a brief biographical sketch followed by an illuminating and accessible reading of Roth's novels, illustrating how the writer constructed one of the richest bodies of work in American letters, capturing the absurdities, contradictions, and turmoil that shaped the United States in the six decades following the Second World War.

Questions of Jewish American identity, the irrationality of male sexual desire, the nature of the American experiment―these are a few of the central concerns that run throughout Roth's oeuvre, and across which his early and late novels speak to one another. Moreover, Shipe considers how Roth's fiction engaged with its historical moment, providing a broader context for understanding how his novels address the changes that transformed American culture during his lifetime.

Matthew A. Shipe is a senior lecturer and director of advanced writing in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the editor, with Scott Dill, of Updike and Politics: New Considerations, and his work has appeared in Philip Roth Studies, The John Updike Review, and numerous edited collections. He is president of the Philip Roth Society and serves on the executive board of the John Updike Society.