Philip Roth: The Biography
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.