Philip Roth: The Biography

Bailey, Blake

ISBN 10: 0224098179 / ISBN 13: 9780224098175

Published by Jonathan Cape, 2021

About this Item

1st edition, 1st printing. VG condition book with dust jacket. DJ is clean, has fresh colours and has little wear to edges. Book has clean and bright contents.

Seller Inventory # 9999-999103050953

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Philip Roth: The Biography
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224098179
• ISBN 13: 9780224098175
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

'Superlative... definitive and genuinely gripping' SUNDAY TIMES

'Utterly engrossing' EVENING STANDARD

'Compulsively readable... Beautifully written... Definitive' OBSERVER

Appointed by Philip Roth and granted complete access and independence, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the post-war literary scene.

Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain. Bailey examines Roth's rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll's House. Tracing Roth's path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth's engagement with nearly every aspect of post-war American culture.

*A 'BOOKS OF 2021' PICK IN THE OBSERVER, GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, EVENING STANDARD AND NEW STATESMAN*