None of the many prizes he has received for his work-including the National Medal of Arts, a Pulitzer Prize, and two National Book Awards-may be as welcome to him as the eagerness that has greeted his every act of talented transgression. Why tell the story of a life one way when, as the author of The Counterlife (1986), you can tell the story one way and another way? In book after book, Roth has violated the boundaries of fact and fiction with the boldness of a smuggler on the Mexican border. Did Alfred Hitchcock insinuate himself into each of his films? Roth wrote many novels disguising himself as the narrator. Had Franz Kafka turned one of his protagonists into an insect? Roth went Kafka one better by turning one of his into a female breast. His breakthrough into fame came with Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the on-the-couch comic monologues of a psychoanalytic patient who is to sex as Pete Rose is to baseball. One of the ways that Roth compensated for the thinness of his experience was to run riot with the possibilities of fiction itself. Much like Ozzie Freeman, the boy in one of Roth’s stories who threatens suicide in order to force his rabbi to admit that God could have brought about a virgin birth, the young author had the chutzpah to provoke attention.

His first book, the collection Goodbye, Columbus (1957), touched a nerve in Jewish readers who recognized (however painfully) their own foibles in its satire, and it also caught the fancy of a broader public that was getting used to the Jewish presence in American fiction.

Still, he found ways of turning his generation’s inexperience into epic adventure. In his fiction, Roth acknowledged his status as a latecomer by casting himself as the perennial son. As a writer, too, he came along after Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and an earlier Roth-the redoubtable Henry-had pioneered an “American Jewish literature” that was richly flavored in the brine of their native Yiddish. Born in 1933 to a decent, hard-working Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, he missed out on the formative deprivations of the immigrant experience and the great Depression, as well as on membership in “the greatest generation” that fought in World War II. It once seemed as though Philip Roth had come on the American scene too late to have any compelling historical subject with which to engage his literary powers.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth