Word: roth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
Catching On. Roth is an enthusiastic mimic. "He takes all the parts in every story and really makes you see the people. He is the best storyteller I know," says Novelist Brian Moore. Lately he has become more wary. "I would call him a manic repressive," says Writer Albert Goldman, an old friend. "He knows he could be rocketed too high-the new hero who is all brains and sex. Actually, he is probably happiest working in monastic solitude." In recent years he has lived in Manhattan, a dashing, dark-featured bachelor with a beautiful blonde at his side...
Where he goes from here is an intriguing question, and could prove a serious dilemma for him. There is quite a difference between letting go and catching on, and with Portnoy's Complaint, Roth has caught on, but good. He has said that he will write about catching...