Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Philip Roth: The Biography
Author: BAILEY BLAKE
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 16/06/2021
Imprint: JONATHAN CAPE
Price: $65.00
Publishing status: Active
The renowned biographer’s definitive portrait of a literary titanAppointed by Philip Roth and
granted complete access and independence, 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 post-war 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 post-war American culture.
ISBN: 9780224098175
Pages: 800