Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, the son of an insurance salesman and the grandchild of European Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Bucknell University and the University of Chicago. After spending a year in the army, Roth began publishing short stories in 1956. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) won the National Book Award, and since then he has published twenty-two books. In the 1990s, Roth won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), and the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995). American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), the first two volumes of the American strilogy that culminates in The Human Stain, received the Pulitzer Prize and the Ambassador Book Award respectively. The narrator of The Human Stain, Nathan Zuckerman, also appears in The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Counterlife (1986). The Human Stain was a PEN/Faulkner Award Winner, a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a Voice Literary Supplement, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angles Times Best Book. Philip Roth also received the Jewish Book Council Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement.

For many years, Roth taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He now lives and writes in Connecticut.