Philip Roth: The Biography

Blake Bailey

ISBN 10: 039324072X / ISBN 13: 9780393240726

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2021

About this Item

First Edition, 1st printing (full number sequence incl. 1). 898pp. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. "After biographer Bailey's prior misdeeds came to light, Norton revoked his contract, pulled this hardcover off the shelves and discontinued the book. This is one of the first editions sold before the book was withdrawn and pulped." [Dan Pope] "Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, 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 postwar 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 postwar American culture." [jacket copy] "Philip Roth, to go with his legendary talent, was a lucky man. That streak continues with Blake Bailey's charming, wise, and witty biography, which achieves a balance and comprehensiveness that shouldn't have been possible so soon after Roth's death."--Jonathan Lethem. "To have our most notable literary biographer tackle a man consistently listed among the planet's master novelists is a monumental gift in the realm of international letters. Not only does Blake Bailey bring his famously scrupulous research to bear on this life packed with equal parts honor and scandal, he does so with economy and narrative force--all while working in elegant, unforgettable prose."--Mary Karr. "A narrative masterwork."--Cynthia Ozick. "Bailey is industrious, rigorous, and uncowed . . . Although Roth would not have enjoyed some of the tumult that will now attend its publication, he might have admired his biographer's refusal to fall under his subject's sway. The man who emerges is a literary genius, constantly getting it wrong, loving others, then hurting them, wrestling with himself and with language, devoted to an almost unfathomable degree to the art of fiction."--David Remnick, The New Yorker. Pristine hardcover w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding, wrapped in a bright, handsome & intact jacket. Quite presentable.

Seller Inventory # RUB2723

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Philip Roth: The Biography
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 039324072X
• ISBN 13: 9780393240726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

New York Times Bestseller

The renowned biographer’s definitive portrait of a literary titan.

Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, 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 postwar 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 postwar American culture.

100 photographs

About the Author

Blake Bailey is the author of biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Prizes. His previous book, The Splendid Things We Planned, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.