Word: jewishness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...using the psychoanalytic monologue as a literary device, Roth has achieved an individuality of tone and gesture and a retrieval of detail that transform his characters into super-stereotypes, well suited for this age of exaggeration. Sophie and Jack Portnoy are pop Jewish parents; the Monkey is the apotheosis of the contemporary Id Girl; and Portnoy embodies not only the tics of a man trying to disentangle himself from his background, but also the latent fear of the liberal humanist that he may find himself out. It is no small concern to the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity, champion...
Letting Go. In many ways, Roth's past life resembles Alex Portnoy's. He was born 35 years ago in a heavily Jewish section of Newark. His father worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Philip zipped through Newark public schools skipping a grade, went on to graduate from Bucknell University magna cum laude. In 1955 he took an M.A. and became an instructor at the University of Chicago, where Theodore Solotaroff, editor of the New American Review, remembers him as "a handsome young man who stood out in the lean and bedraggled midst of us veteran graduate...
Already Roth's miniatures of urban Jewish life were selling to magazines. The collection of short stories, Goodbye, Columbus, won Roth the National Book Award in 1960 at the age of 26 and two years later the prestigious job of writer-in-residence at Princeton. There he discovered to his dismay that his students could not write. In addition, his marriage to an older divorcee collapsed after four years. Philip went to New York after the publication of Letting Go, a troubled novel that interweaves threads from his Chicago adventure, his marriage and his grim life as a graduate...
...published When She Was Good, a bleak dissection of a smalltown Midwestern termagant without a single Jewish character. It was a long way from Newark and the Jewish milieu, but Roth's ventriloqual genius enabled him to handle the unfamiliar setting with considerable success...
...manager, thinks about it and laughs, intimately. James T. Lewis, publisher, leans back in his chair. He has a beard. Graduated from Harvard Business School. Stephen Mindich, associate publisher, has dark, dark eyes which sparkle. He tells Sullivan how to pronounce Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern; he knows because he's Jewish...