PHILIP ROTH: FAREWELL GIANT LITTERATEUR
AT THE AGE OF 85 YEARS, PHILIP ROTH PASSES AWAY OF CONGESTIVE HEART FAILURE. THE WORLD LOSES A GIANT OF LITERATURE.
PHILIP ROTH: A GREAT CONTEMPORARY AUTHOR
||The New Yorker has awakened the world with a sad news: Philip Roth died at the night of 22nd May 2018. He was 85 years old and apparently, his death was caused from a heart failure. || his literary agent Andre Wylie has confirmed the sad event. The author had decided to stop to write in 2012, declaring, << The fight with writing is over >>. Perhaps the cause of this frustration was that he never received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Roth had by now put aside his pen.
Born in 1933 at Newark (New Jersey), the novelist was the son of Galician immigrants of Jewish origin. Subsequently, he graduated from Bucknell University and earned a master’s in Anglo-Saxon Literature from Chicago University. After a career as a writing teacher and university professor, in 1991 he decided to dedicate exclusively to his great passion: writing. A complex personality, he could not separate his personal life from the universes he created in his novels. In fact, a part of his is present in all his work. For this reason, Philip Roth has been successful in creating art from ordinary life, contributing to enriching contemporary literary heritage.
His career
Philip Roth started with Goodbye Columbus and five short stories, six stories in which the ironic style emerges in a manner that is clearly evident, cultivated and influenced by various cultural suggestions of the author. Then he published Letting go, a novel which confronts the theme of co-existence between Jews and Christians. Continuing another novel, When She Was Good, in which the character of Lucy Nelson is inspired by the author’s first wife.
But success came with his fourth book: Portnoy’s Complaint, personal comedy and tragedy at the same time. The themes of psychiatry, of sex and neurosis caused scandal, but later the number of sales was however very high. Many other titles followed: Our Gang (1971), The Breast (1972), The Great American Novel (1973), The Professor of Desire (1977), The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), The Prague Orgy (1985), The Counterlife (1986), The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) and Patrimony: A True Story (1991).
Recent works
Finally, in 1997, he published the work for which everybody knows him: American Pastoral, a novel that The New Yorker defined as, “epochal”. In this great work, we find a recurring character in Roth’s literature, namely Nathan Zuckerman, who is half-based on his old friend. The latter tells the story in a series of events of his older brother, Seymour Levov known as “the Swede”, because of his Nordic features, in contrast to the Jewish community to which he belonged. Zuckerman then decided to reconstruct an imaginary biography of Seymour. Obviously, Seymour was born in Newark, just like its creator. From this great novel was drawn a film in 2016, American Pastoral.
Philip Roth, therefore has given works of literature of inestimable value. The world today says goodbye to this great author, who, regardless of recognition, has given his face to contemporary literature.
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