Philip Roth: The Biography (First Edition)

Bailey, Blake

ISBN 10: 039324072X / ISBN 13: 9780393240726

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2021

About this Item

Norton, New York, 2021. First edition, first printing (with full number sequence including the 1). Hardbound. Very Fine in a very fine dust jacket, with price ($40.00) intact on front jacket flap. A pristine unread copy. Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. Shipped in well padded box. After Blake Bailey's prior misdeeds came to light, Norton pulled this hardcover off the shelves and discontinued the book. Skyhorse published a trade paperback edition after Norton revoked the author's contract. This is one of the first editions sold before the book was withdrawn and pulped. CLS.

Seller Inventory # GW-462

Bibliographic Details

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