Philip Roth’s Political Thought

This book looks at the political thought of one of the giants of American literature: Philip Roth. Roth’s depiction of American life may initially appear provincial, American-Jewish life in Newark, New Jersey, but his portrayal of his hometown can be seen as a microcosm of America itself: its political aspirations, its political failures, and its political self-reflection about what it means to be an American. Of course, the oeuvre of Roth’s writings transcends the subject of political thought itself, raising larger questions about the role that literature, identity, and sex play in our lives. While acknowledging that Roth’s writings ask us what it is to be human in the broadest and most complex sense of the term, this book only will focus on Roth’s political thinking.

The political themes in Roth’s works are myriad and numerous, from questions of American-Jewish identity, Zionism, and American attitudes towards Israel in works like Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Operation Shylock to the exploration of subjects such as freedom, equality, and tolerance in the Exit Ghost, American Pastoral, and I Married a Communist. Roth not only examines the topics of race, class, and gender in The Breast, The Human Stain, and Nemesis but also ideas of political progress, utopia, and corruption in The Dying Animal, Our Gang, and The Plot Against America. And Roth himself was politically active as a vigorous supporter of dissent writers in Communist Czechoslovakia. Given these themes in his works and his role as a political activist, it is clear that one could categorize him as a political thinker.

Strangely, the scholarship on Philip Roth’s political thought is sparse. The only monograph that explicitly addresses Roth’s political thought is Claudia Franziska Brühwiler’s Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth that focuses on the subject of political identity.[1] Simon Stow explores the question whether Roth is a political thinker in his article, “Written and Unwritten America: Roth on Reading, Politics, and Theory”; Anthony Hutchison investigates how Roth uses political ideology in the American Trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain); and Maureen Whitebrook’s examines Roth’s use of political identity in Operation Shylock.[2] Finally, Michael Kimmage’s In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy indirectly addresses political issues in Roth’s American Trilogy but from the vantage point of history and not political science.[3]

Except for the works cited above, the scholarship on Roth has been primarily literary in nature rather than political. Some of the most prominent works are David Gooblar’s The Major Phases of Philip Roth which explores the nature of Philip Roth’s entire oeuvre as a literary project; Debra Shostak’s Philip Roth, which discusses various aspects of Roth’s American Trilogy; and Aimee Pozorski’s Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) which appeals to a broader audience with a focus on American history.[4] Other recent publications about Roth include Aimee Pozorski’s Roth and Celebrity which explores Roth’s public persona; David Brauner’s Philip Roth which focuses on the use of paradox as a rhetorical device to analyze ideological principles in his works; Pia Masiero’s Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books which concentrates on Roth’s recurring character, Nathan Zuckerman; Jane Statlander’s Philip Roth’s Postmodern American Romance which discusses the impact of Roth’s Jewishness on his position within American literature; and Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound: A Writer and his Works which is a critical biography of the person and his works.[5] Finally, there are edited collections that explore Roth’s work but, again, primarily from a literary perspective: Derek Parker Royal’s Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author; Timothy Parish’s The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth; and Velichka D. Ivanova’s Philip Roth and World Literature.[6]

By inviting scholars from the United States and abroad to provide an interdisciplinary and international perspective of his political thought, our book fills this void in the scholarship about Philip Roth’s works. We have invited a mixture of established and rising scholars to provide an assessment of it. By engaging his major works, these contributors explore and critically evaluate the various aspects of Roth’s work in a political context. Not only will this book remedy the deficiency in the scholarship about Philip Roth, but it also will provide a broader perspective about the nature and purpose of Roth’s political thought for disciplines outside political science and for countries beyond the United States.

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Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933 and was the second child of Herman and Bess Roth, first-generation American Jews who lived in Newark, New Jersey, a place from where Roth would draw inspiration for many of his works.[7] During Roth’s childhood, Newark was a city filled with upward-striving immigrants with the Jewish enclave being in the southwest corner of the city, known as Weequahic. His childhood was typical of an immigrant child in America during the thirties and forties with school, baseball, and listening to the radio. However, Roth also was cognizant of his Jewish identity, not only because his family attended synagogue or that he went to Hebrew school, but also because he observed anti-Semitism as a child, whether listening to the tirades of Father Coughlin on the radio or observing how high the company ladder his father would be allowed to climb because he was a Jew. This sense of aspiring to be an American and not being fully accepted because of his Jewishness would be a theme to which Roth constantly returns in his career as a writer. He felt that he was sharing this search for a definite sense of belonging with Saul Bellow, as Roth explained with regards to the constant labelling as an “American-Jewish writer”: “The book that brought him his first popular recognition, Adventures of Augie March, does not begin ‘I am a Jew, New York–born’ but ‘I am an American, Chicago–born.’”[8]

After graduating from high school in 1950, Roth enrolled in Bucknell University and earned a degree in English.[9] He pursued graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received an M.A. in English Literature in 1955 and worked briefly as an instructor in the university’s writing program.[10] Roth also served two years in the United States Army (1955-56) and, after his honorable discharge, wrote short fiction and criticism for various magazines. But it was his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, that Roth entered the American literary scene with his stories about the concerns of assimilated American Jews as they depart from their ethnic enclaves for the suburban life. Although he won the 1960 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, Roth was accused by some members in the American Jewish community as a self-hating Jew, an accusation that was made to him directly in 1962 at a panel to discuss minority representation in American literature.[11]

Roth’s next novel, Letting Go, was published in 1962 and was about the social constraints on men and women in the 1950s.[12] In the following year, Roth separated from his first wife, Margaret Martinson, whom he met in 1956 in Chicago and married in 1959. Their separation and her death in a car crash in 1968 were events that influenced Roth to model some of his female characters in his novels, like Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good (1967) and Maureen Tarnopol in My Life as a Man (1974).[13] After When She Was Good, Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint was published in 1969, a novel that not only made Roth a public figure but also sparked a storm of controversy over its explicit treatment of sexuality, such as detailed depictions of masturbation.[14] Roth’s followed Portnoy’s Complaint with a satire of the Nixon Administration in Our Gang (1971) and The Breast (1972) which features David Kepesh, who also appears as the protagonist in The Professor of Desire (1974) and The Dying Animal (2001).[15] In this trilogy, Kepesh’s life is depicted as a literature professor who is able to gratify his sexual desires but unable to emotionally connect with others, with him at one point being transformed into a 155-pound breast.[16]

Further underlying his versatility as a writer, Roth wrote the satirical The Great American Novel (1973), which is about a Communist conspiracy to eliminate the history of a baseball league, and the non-fiction, Reading Myself and Others (1975), an anthology of essays, interviews, and criticism that assesses his work at that time in a conversation with other American authors and critics.[17] But it was My Life as a Man (1974) that introduces the protagonist Nathan Zuckerman that Roth would employ in his later works.[18] Zuckerman is not only the protagonist in Roth’s last novel of the 1970s, The Ghost Writer (1979), but also dominates in the following novels: Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985) (with these four books later referred to as Zuckerman Bound), The Counterlife (1986), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000), and Exit Ghost (2007). With Zuckerman, Roth creates a fictional alter ego who explores the relationship between art and life, religious and national identity, and the consequences of the choices one makes in life in family, career, and sexual partners.[19]

Roth also visited Prague in 1970s, with his first visit in 1972 when he was introduced into Czech history, culture, and politics, inspiring him to write stories about Kafka that were republished in Reading Myself and Others. Roth continually returned to Prague to visit Czech writers like Ivan Klíma, Milan Kundera, and Václav Havel until 1977 when he was declared persona non grata.[20] During these trips, Roth smuggled money into the country to support these writers, which eventually led to PEN to take over these arrangements, and he helped get their works published in the United States.[21] Roth’s experiences in Prague had a lasting effect on him as a writer and political activist to the extent that he dedicated The Ghost Writer to Milan Kundrea, a novel which imagines a life for Anne Frank if she were to survive the Holocaust.[22]

Besides his trips to Prague, Roth also traveled regularly to Paris, where Milan Kundrea had managed to relocate, in the late 1970s, and, by the early 1980s, he also traveled to Israel. Roth began a relationship with the English actress Clair Bloom and rented a writing studio in London where he stayed in the winters and also renewed and made new friendships with members of the British literary and cultural crowd.[23] Roth and Bloom married in 1990 but separated in 1994, with Bloom writing a memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House (1996) which describes the marriage in detail with an unflattering portrayal of Roth.[24]

During the 1980s, Roth again produced a series of a novels that employed his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman: Zuckerman Unbound (1981) is about Zuckerman’s confronting infamy for the success of Carnovsky, a Portnoy-like book; The Anatomy Lesson (1983) is a reflection about the protagonist in pain and in middle-age, contemplating about enrolling in medical school; The Prague Orgy (1985) recounts Zuckerman journeys to Prague to obtain a manuscript of unpublished stories of a Yiddish stories; and The Counterlife (1986) which includes Nathan’s brother, Henry, and presents multiple accounts of their lives that contradict one another in their search for meaning in marriage, family, and the role that Israel plays in the lives of Jews.[25] Roth concluded the decade with a non-fictional book, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), which traced his life from childhood to becoming a successful and respected novelist, with Roth and Zuckerman writing letters to each other.[26]

In Deception (1990) Roth used his own name as a protagonist who has conversations with his married English lover about their loveless, upper-middle class marriages held together, in her case, only by a child.[27] This book was followed by Patrimony: A True Story (1991): a memoir about the life and death of Roth’s father from a brain tumor. In 1993 the revised A Philip Roth Reader (originally published in 1980) was reissued, which include selections from Roth’s first eight novels as well as stories like “Novotny’s Pain” and “Looking at Kafka.”[28] But it was Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), and I Married a Communist (1998) where Roth returned to prominence in American literature. Operation Shylock, which was awarded the 1994 PEN/Faulkner Award in 1994, is about the character Philip Roth’s journey to Israel only to discover his identity has been appropriated by someone proclaiming Diaporism, a counter-Zionist ideology; Sabbath’s Theater, winner of the 1995 National Book Award, centers on an elderly former puppeteer whose loss of his partner, Drenka, precipitates a crisis in his life; American Pastoral, which was honored with the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, recounts the tragic fate of Seymour “Swede” Levov during the tumultuous 1960s; and I Married a Communist follows the life of the Communist, Ira Ringold, whose success as a radio star is destroyed by  wife, daughter, and others close to him.[29]

During the 2000s, Roth wrote The Human Stain, which was awarded the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award, a story about the African-American Coleman Silk who passes himself off as white and Jewish; The Dying Animal (2001), the last novel of the David Kepesh’s trilogy; The Plot Against America (2007), a counterfactual history of the United States with a fascist government; Exit Ghost (2007), the last book that features Nathan Zuckerman; and a collection of previously published interviews with important twentieth-century writers entitled Shop Talk (2001).[30] Roth also published four books in this decade on the theme of “four men of different ages brought down low”: Everyman (2006), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, follows the life of an ordinary person’s reflection on life and death; Indignation (2008) tells the story of Marcus Messner whose atheism leads to his expulsion from college and enlistment into the U.S. Army; The Humbling (2009) narrates the life of Simon Axler, an actor who compensates for his stage fright with a sexual relationship with a younger woman; and Nemesis (2010), the last published book of Roth’s career, that recounts the effects of the polio epidemic in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark.[31]

Philip Roth is one of the most honored American writers: his books have thrice won the PEN/Faulkner Award; twice received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and also awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Man Book International Prize, and the National Humanities Medal, as well as international prizes such as the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award and an award by the German newspaper WELT.[32] He is only the third living American writer to have his works published by the Library of America, an honor previously bestowed to Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow. Along with John Updike and Saul Bellow, Roth is considered one of the greatest American authors of the second half of the twentieth century. He has played a central role in American letters during his lifetime and consequently deserves attention not only as a writer but also as a political thinker.

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This volume is targeted at a diverse audience of scholars interested in literature, philosophy, intellectual history, religious studies, and the social sciences. Given the number of novels, short stories, essays, and works of non-fiction that Roth has written, we have restricted ourselves to what we think are key developments in Roth’s political thought as opposed to chasing down and analyzing every sentence he had written. We also have limited ourselves to analyzing Roth’s works themselves as opposed to adopting a comparative analysis of his work with other authors’ that have inspired him. Although we believe such a comparison is a worthy endeavor for a future project, we think that Roth’s political thought has to be presented and understood on its own terms first.

Roth’s writing directly engages some of the major social and political events in twentieth-century America: the Great Depression; World War II and the Holocaust; the Vietnam and Korean Wars; the quiz show scandals and anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s; the civil rights and radical revolutionary movements of the 1960s; the corruption of the Nixon’s Administration and political repression of Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1970s; the rise of conservatism in the 1980s and political correctness in the 1990s; the Lewinsky Scandal and the War on Terror; and the prejudice and assimilation of Jewish-Americans into mainstream American society as well as the ethnic, social, and economic stratification of the U.S. in general. These and other key events and developments in America serve as the political template for Roth’s works. With America as his canvas, Roth illuminates how the personal lives of ordinary Americans are affected and in turn affect the public events of national life—as he said himself:

America is the place I know best in the world. It’s the only place I know in the world. My consciousness and my language were shaped by America. I’m an American writer in ways that a plumber isn’t an American plumber or a miner an American miner or a cardiologist an American cardiologist. Rather, what the heart is to the cardiologist, the coal to the miner, the kitchen sink to the plumber, America is to me.[33]

Although Roth’s own political position is clear, as a New Deal liberal or Clinton Democrat, his fiction is not written from this vantage point and the pieties of American liberalism are exposed for their faults and contradictions. He explores the tension between the American aspiration for perfection and the limitations, whether due to politics, prejudice, or his characters’ own poor choices, that thwarts that desire. Opposed to moral absolutism of any kind, Roth’s writings serves a bulwark against the political extremism and fanaticism that sometimes haunts America. Without this critical scrutiny, perhaps even provocation, from Roth’s works, American democracy would not be able to examine itself and therefore be able to pull itself back from the brink of political madness to which it has from time to time succumbed.

The first chapter is a reprint of Philip Roth’s remarks at the 2013 PEN Literary Gala when Roth speaks about his experience of traveling to Prague to assist Czech writer, Ivan Klíma. Roth describes how the Czech intelligentsia who did not conform to the Communist regime were marginalized in society and had to perform menial jobs in order to live. For Roth, totalitarianism was a regime that suppressed one’s identity in “rites of degradation,” causing an unbearable anger at oneself, one’s family, and one’s community. Yet, in spite of the humiliation inflicted upon its citizens by the government, people were able to discover that they still had a reservoir of self-respect, dignity, and even humor to cope in those difficult times.

The next chapter, “’An ear in search of a word’: Writing and the Politics of Listening in Roth’s I Married a Communist,” argues that literature can play a role of being a witness to atrocities and take actions to make suffering transformative. In her analysis of I Married a Communist, Aimee Pozorski not only understands the novel as an account of the anti-Communist agenda in the United States that affected Roth both as a writer and as a citizen, but also how this experience formed his public life, such as in the elegy he published in The New York Times, which celebrated his former mentor, and the speech he delivered at the 2013 PEN Literary Gala. According to Pozorski, listening is not a passive activity but an active one that records events for a public record in the hope that it will be used to change minds, lives, and even history itself.

In “Serving His Tour as an ‘Exasperated Liberal and Indignant Citizen’: Philip Roth, a Public Intellectual,” Claudia Franziska Brühwiler shows that, in spite of his constant complaints of not being a public intellectual, Roth is a stellar example of one. Although Americans writers are not held to the same standard as their European counterparts, Roth’s writing still provokes political discussion whether it is a defense of artistic freedom, a response to charges of misogyny, or criticizing presidential politics. But perhaps it is his support of dissident writers in Czechoslovakia that demonstrates Roth is a public intellectual in both word and in deed.

Simon Stow looks at how Roth’s novels can help democratic citizens better understand American politics in his chapter, “The Politics and Literature of Unknowingness: Philip Roth’s Our Gang and The Plot Against America.” Stow uses the concepts of “unknowing” and “knowing” to explain how literature can either prompt  citizens to reflect upon their political beliefs (“unknowing”) or merely reinforce what they already believe (“knowing”). By comparing Our Gang, which is characterized by “knowing,” with The Plot Against America, which is a work that is “unknowing,” Stow shows how Roth succeeds in one case and fails in another, suggesting how literature can provoke critical political reflection rather than being didactic.

The theme of the political ideologies of perfectionism, Zionism, and progress characterize the next three chapters.  In “Four Pathologies and a State of Sanity: Political Philosophy and Philip Roth on the Individual in Society,” Michael G. Festl illuminates how the aspirations of the characters in Roth’s American Trilogy are actually pathologies that plague these characters. Rather than reconciling themselves to the reality in which they live, these characters aspire to “perfection” which leads to death and destruction. Festl spells out a typology of a lack of reconciliation (Merry Levov and Lester Farley), partial reconciliation (Eve Frame), and over-reconciliation (Swede, Coleman, and Ira) with tragic results. Only William Orcutt III, the lover of the Swede’s wife, is perfectly reconciled to American society, a civilized savagery that is unbearable to the reader and thereby indicts American society with its ideology of perfectionism.

Louis Gordon examines a different type of ideology, Zionoism, in “Three Voices or One? Philip Roth and Zionism.” In this chapter Gordon compares the Zionist views of Philip Roth the author in The Facts, Philip Roth the character in Operation Shylock, and the character Nathan Zuckerman in Counterlife. What Gordon discovers is that very little divergence exists among these three voices on the question of Zionism: all of them adopt a political progressive stance towards Israel and Zionism that is similar to the Israeli Civil Rights and Democracy Movement.

The final ideology that is examined is the American myth of progress, a faith in the infinite advancement that has continuously informed in various degrees America’s understanding of itself. In “Roth at Century’s End: The Problem of Progress in The Dying Animal,” Matthew Shipe argues that this myth is critiqued by David Kepesh’s struggle to find meaning in the political and cultural changes that he has experienced in his lifetime. When the apocalypse never materializes in the new millennium, Kepesh, unlike his American compatriots, does not accept an optimistic future of an ever-expanding global capitalism and liberal democracy. He instead resigns himself to the limitations of what he can comprehend about the future as well as the past for himself and his country.

The final set of chapters explores the role that the body plays in the political themes of race, class, gender, and religious identity. In “‘Novotny’s Pain’: Philip Roth on Politics and the Problem of Pain,” Till Kinzel reveals to us the connection between the Novotny’s pain and the body politic of the American republic in the middle of the twentieth-century, signaling the non-tragic nature of liberal democracy: Novotny’s alienation from war and military life ceases to have any significance for him once he continues with his life. His pain consequently serves as a non-verbal bodily sign of disagreement with the non-controversiality of the Korean War and the government proclamations of “fighting for freedom” to arouse public support.

Yael Maurer continues this theme of the body in her chapter, “The Body Politic: Philip Roth’s American Men,” where she focuses on the Jewish male body as a site of political anxiety and possible heroic liberation in Portnoy’s Complaint, I Married a Communist and Nemesis. Whereas in Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s comical presentation of the body as both personal and political precludes the reader from feeling the protagonist’s pain when he falls from his ideals, the other two novels provides us protagonists that are just as youthful as Alexander but the negation of their personal and political bodies have tragic consequences. Bucky’s and Ira’s fates leave them, and the reader, to try to make sense of their past, their ideals, and of history itself.

Debra Shostak’s “Philip Roth Life as a Man” also focuses on the body but from both the male and female perspectives. She also concentrates on Roth’s later novels, as Roth scholarship already has explored these themes in the works of his early to mid-career. In her chapter Shostak shows how the ideological discourses of gender and sexuality deform what it means to be a human being in Roth’s works. Paying attention to manhood as a type of moral achievement and bodily performance, Shostak argues that the struggles of women, in response to men, have made them grotesque human beings, too. Contrary to some claims, Shostak suggests that the place of the feminine in Roth’s works recuperates Roth to some degree from the repeated accusations that he offers misogynistic representations of women.

In “The American Berserk in Sabbath’s Theater,” Brett Ashley Kaplan includes race and anti-Semitism with gender in her study of victimization and perpetration. For Kaplan, Jewish anxiety is not only about the fear of being a victim but also a dread of being a perpetrator of racism and sexism. Sabbath’s Theater expresses this anxiety, the confusion between victimization and perpetration, through Sabbath’s sexuality, especially when he compare himself to Benito Mussolini or imagines himself being buried next to a Holocaust survivor. Thus, Sabbath not only fears of being a victim but also being a perpetrator of the very things that repulses him.

The last chapter of this book is “Philip Roth and the American ‘Underclass’ in The Human Stain” where Andy Connolly examines the role that class plays, along with race and identity politics, in The Human Stain. Connolly looks at Faunia Farley’s status as a maligned “white underclass” and how her social position contrasts with the committed belief held by Coleman Silk that he has transcended the historical boundaries established by his racial origins. Through a detailed examination of Faunia’s life, Connolly shows that her inescapable sense of belonging to the underclass provides a new way of understanding the limitations that Coleman believes he has overcome.

Besides our contributors, we want to thank Stephen Wrinn and his staff at the University of Kentucky Press for guiding us through this process as well as the anonymous referees and Patrick Deneen, the series editor. We also want to express our gratitude to the University of St.Gallen and the Dr. h.c. Emil Zugg-Fonds for providing us funds to reprint Roth’s 2013 PEN Literary Gala Remarks as well as to Aimee Pozorski and the Wiley Agency for helping us obtain the rights. Finally, we would like to thank our parents, our spouses–PD Dr. iur. Daniel Häusermann and Dr. MiJung–and our friends for their continual and enduring love and support while we worked on this project.

Ultimately what we will discover in Roth’s work is a depth, complexity, and richness not only about politics and political thought but what it means to be a human being. By having some of the foremost known and rising scholars on Roth participating in this project, we hope this volume will engage scholars from a variety of specialties and perspectives and will serve as a valuable resource to scholars and readers of Philip Roth as well as to members of the general public. The brilliance of Roth’s work, along with the sheer volume of it, secures his place in American letters. It will take several years to unravel his impact not only in literature but in politics, philosophy, religion, and other disciplines. We do not claim that this is the definitive account of Roth’s political thought; rather, we think it is as a starting point for our exploration of it. We look forward to future books, articles, and essays on this topic.

Notes

[1] Claudia Franziska Brühwiler, Political Initiation in the Novels of Philip Roth (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

[2] Simon Stow, “Written and Unwritten America: Roth on Reading, Politics, and Theory,” Philosophy and Literature 30 (2004): 410-23; Anthony Hutchison, Writing the Republic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Maureen Whitebrook, Identity, Narrative and Politics (London: Routledge, 2001): 43-63. Catherine Morley also dedicates one chapter of her book to Roth’s American Trilogy. The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature: Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth (London: Routledge, 2009).

[3] Michael Kimmage, In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Trilogy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012).

[4] David Gooblar, The Major Phases of Philip Roth (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); Debra Shostak, Philip Roth: American Pastoral, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); Aimee Pozorski, Roth and Trauma: The Problem of History in the Later Works (1995-2010) (Bloomsbury, 2011).

[5] Aimee Pozorski, Roth and Celebrity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012); David Brauner, Philip Roth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Pia Masiero, Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press); Jane Statlander, Philip Roth’s Postmodern American Romance (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Claudia Roth Pierpont, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).

[6] Derek Parker Royal, ed., Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005); Timothy Parish, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Velichka D. Ivanova, ed. Philip Roth and World Literature: Transatlantic Perspectives and Uneasy Passages (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014). For more about Roth’s scholarship, refer to The Philip Roth Society’s website at http://www.philiprothsociety.org/#!bibliography/c1sah.

[7] Pierpont, Roth Unbound, 13-14.

[8] Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (New York: Vintage International, 2001), 104.

[9] Ibid., 23-27

[10] Ibid., 28-30, 35-36, 75. Until 1991, when he retired from academia, Roth continued to teach but this time creative writing and comparative literature at such places like the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

[11] Ibid., 7-14.

[12] Pierpont, Roth Unbound, 34-36.

[13] Ibid., 36-45.

[14] Ibid., 53-68.

[15] For more about Our Gang, refer to Ibid., 69-75.

[16] For more about The Breast, Dying Animal, Professor of Desire, refer to Ibid., 104-7.

[17] For more about The Great American Novel, refer to Ibid., 76-77; Reading Myself and Others, refer to Ibid., 70, 282.

[18] For more about My Life as a Man, refer to Ibid., 81-85.

[19] Ibid.,111-112

[20] Ibid., 886-88, 91, 95, 98.

[21] Ibid., 92-93, 96-97

[22] For more about The Ghost Writer, refer to Ibid., 108-21.

[23] Ibid., 99-100, 141-42.

[24] For more about Claire Bloom’s relationship to Roth, refer to Ibid., 99-101, 121-122, 143, 152, 99-101, 121-122, 143, 152, 167-70, 226-29.

[25] For more about Zuckerman Unbound, refer to Ibid., 124-27; The Anatomy Lesson, 128-37; The Prague Orgy, 137-40; The Counterlife, 143-57.

[26] For more about The Facts, refer to Ibid., 160-62, 166, 176, 203, 323.

[27] Ibid., 168-70.

[28] For more about Patrimony, refer to Ibid., 171-73; Novotny’s Pain,” 29, 119.

[29] For more about Sabbath’s Theater, refer to Ibid., 189-25; I Married a Communist, 230-38, and its relationship to Claire Bloom, 226-29; Operation Shylock, 137-88. Operation Shylock incorporates the temporary side-effects Roth experience of the sedative halcion, 186-88.

[30] For more about The Dying Animal, refer to Ibid., 23-27, 260-69; Human Stain, 245-58; The Plot Against America, 271-79; Exit Ghost, 289-95; Shop Talk, 111, 157, 273.

[31] Ibid., 319. For more about Everyman, refer to Ibid., 248-89; Indignation, 296-302; The Humbling, 309-11; Nemesis, 311-19.

[32] Claudia Franziska Brühwiler, “A Reluctant Public Intellectual: Philip Roth in the German-speaking Media,” Philip Roth Studies 10 (2014): 77-90.

[33] Roth, Readings, 110.

Available are the following chapters: “Serving His Tour as an “Exasperated Liberal and Indignant Citizen”: Philip Roth, a Public Intellectual?”; “The Politics and Literature of Unknowingness: Philip Roth’s Our Gang and The Plot Against America”; and “Four Pathologies and a State of Sanity: Political Philosophy and Philip Roth on the Individual in Society”; also see the introduction to Andy Connolly’s Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition and Lee Trepanier’s essays, “The Paradoxes of the Body in Everyman, Nemesis, and The Humbling” and “What Can Philip Roth Tell Us About Politics Today.”

This was originally published with the same title in A Political Companion to Philip Roth (University of Kentucky Press, 2017).

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