Phillip Roth: Unmasked

Explore the life of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning novelist Philip Roth, often referred to as the greatest living American writer. Goodbye, Columbus, his collection of short stories published in 1959, put the 26-year-old Roth on the map, and 10 years later, Portnoy's Complaint propelled him into an international scandalous spotlight. Yet he steadily earned his reputation as a man of letters, commanding ownership of the Jewish-American novel and making Newark, New Jersey, a literary destination. Practically inventing the genre of factual-fictional autobiography, Roth's thinly veiled Zuckerman books follow the protagonist's path from aspiring young writer to compromised celebrity, and, lately, older man facing death. Roth's career was considered declining by 1990 and then exploded with a dozen bestsellers in the past two decades, including Sabbath's Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000).