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Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity.

This renewed a controversy over whether his satirical treatment of Jewish themes constituted anti- Semitism. That controversy reached a fever pitch with his novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which created a sensation in 1969 because of its explicit recounting of a young lawyer’s sexual autobiography, consisting largely of compulsive attempts to free himself from the strict confines of his Jewish upbringing. 


Since then, Roth’s output has ranged from wild comedy and political satire to examinations of his role as a writer and son and metafictional explorations of the relationship between art and life, fiction and reality, imagination and fact; or, as he has put it, the “relationship between the written and the unwritten world.”

In an interview with Mervyn Rothstein for the New York Times (August 1, 1985), Roth identified his primary theme as “the tension between license and restraint, . . . a struggle between the hunger for personal liberty and the forces of inhibition.” [Philip Roth Society]

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