Death of Philip Roth - American master

When Philip Roth, the grand old man of American letters who has died, announced in 2012 that he would no longer write fiction, the critic James Walton declared:

“It’s a bit like hearing that Keith Richards has given up rock and roll, or that the Pope is abandoning religion.”

Roth was a prolific essayist and critic as well as a novelist but it his fiction that endures, from the sexually explicit Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 to Nemesis in 2010, exploring life, love, lust and the contradictions of the human condition.

Roth’s fiction was often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey, as he mined the Jewish-American experience, crafting multiple “fake biographies” that drew gasps of admiration from fans as well as groans from detractors.

For more than six decades of writing, he tasted fame and controversy in equal measure, exhibiting a disdain for both.

In more than 30 novels, Roth helped emancipate American literature from the shackles of respectability, producing self-revelatory masterpieces of humanity and memory. He was one of the great novelists of the 20th and early 21st century.