We specialize in hard to find items
All Categories
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Philip Roth: The Biography
Product Description “I don’t want you to rehabilitate me,” Philip Roth said to his only authorized biographer, Blake Bailey. “Just make me interesting.” Granted complete independence and access, Bailey spent almost ten years poring over Roth’s personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and listening to Roth’s own breathtakingly candid confessions. Cynthia Ozick, in her front-page rave for the New York Times Book Review, described Bailey’s monumental biography as “a narrative masterwork … As in a novel, what is seen at first to be casual chance is revealed at last to be a steady and powerfully demanding drive. … under Bailey’s strong light what remains on the page is one writer’s life as it was lived, and―almost―as it was felt." Though Roth is generally considered an autobiographical novelist—his alter-egos include not only the Roth-like writer Nathan Zuckerman, but also a recurring character named Philip Roth—relatively little is known about the actual life on which so vast an oeuvre was supposedly based. Bailey reveals a man who, by design, led a highly compartmentalized life: a tireless champion of dissident writers behind the Iron Curtain on the one hand, Roth was also the Mickey Sabbath-like roué who pursued scandalous love affairs and aspired “[t]o affront and affront and affront till there was no one on earth unaffronted"—the man who was pilloried by his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House. Towering above it all was Roth’s achievement: thirty-one books that give us “the truest picture we have of the way we live now,” as the poet Mark Strand put it in his remarks for Roth’s Gold Medal at the 2001 American Academy of Arts and Letters ceremonial. 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. Review "Blake Bailey’s comprehensive life of Philip Roth―to tell it outright―is a narrative masterwork … As in a novel, what is seen at first to be casual chance is revealed at last to be a steady and powerfully demanding drive. … under Bailey’s strong light what remains on the page is one writer’s life as it was lived, and―almost―as it was felt." ― Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review (cover) "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 "[Roth] got to be remembered [in Bailey's biography] as a man: hilarious, mercurial, genuinely kind but fickle and meanspirited too. A man, rather than an inert legacy." ― Mark Oppenheimer, New York Times Magazine "Superlative … Bailey's account is definitive and genuinely gripping to boot. … He leads us lucidly through a dense palimpsest of overlapping drafts, fictional identities, literary feuds and women." ― Claire Lowdon, Times of London "Meticulous, masterfully organized and heroically fair-minded … [T]here are sparkling scenes portraying Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, lunching with the Kennedys on Martha’s Vineyard, even a flirtation with Jackie Onassis, the only woman Roth was too awed by to pursue." ― Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "Beautifully written … compulsively readable … It is hard to imagine a book that will come up with a more definitive series of answers than this one." ― Tim Adams, Observer "A wonderful book that seems certain to become the definitive biography of Roth’s fascinating, sometimes troubling, life―Roth was a brilliant writer, and Bailey does him justice in this beautifully written and h
