Word: rothe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Life is being alone in a room," says Roth, who does most of his writing in a two-room cottage several hundred yards from the main house. "At this stage of the game I know it. I know there is no way out. You choose your prison, and I've tried to put mine in paradise." The room is neat and sparsely furnished. A worn book about Newark is at hand for reference, and a haunted Franz Kafka gazes from a prominently displayed photograph to remind the writer of paradise's alternative...
...Roth has never had an easy time behind his typewriter. He is a demanding craftsman who has chosen difficult material. "Intimacy and subjectivity are my subjects," he explains, though that is as far as he goes toward defining the boundary between himself and Nathan Zuckerman. Their Newarks are the same; both lived in the Weequahic section, which Roth describes as once having been a Jewish village of hard-working plumbers, salesmen and shopkeepers...
Herman and Elizabeth Roth's youngest son skipped two grades, entering high school at twelve. His senior yearbook was premonitory: "A boy of real intelligence, combined with wit and common sense." Roth recalls that at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pa., he asked his English instructor if he should participate in activities that would help him get along with people. "Why would you want to do a thing like that?" replied the prof. Says the reluctant joiner: "It was wonderful ... the first great line of my education...
Formal learning continued at the University of Chicago, where Roth earned a master's degree in literature. Quarterlies published his first stories. One of them, The Contest for Aaron Gold, was selected for the 1956 Martha Foley collection of Best American Short Stories. By this time, he was a 22-year-old PFC churning out press releases for the U.S. Army. In off-hours, he used his Government-issue typewriter to compose the tales that would eventually merge in Goodbye, Columbus...
This work won the 1960 National Book Award for fiction and launched a career that has seen its share of fluctuations. Readers and critics kept expecting the fresh voice of that first book, while Roth labored to expand his range. Letting Go was a solid conventional novel about graduate-school life; When She Was Good told a depressing story of how a Middle Western girl became a man hater. Portnoy brought his distinctive tone back with a vengeance. Its success freed him from money worries but encouraged what he calls "the unreckoned consequences...