Philip (Milton) Roth (1933-) American novelist and short story writer. Roth achieved first fame with GOODBYE COLUMBUS (1959). It consisted of a novella and five short stories and described the life of a of Jewish middle-class family. Ten years later appeared PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, a 'masturbation story' about young man's search for freedom using forbidden sex as his way of escape. The book gained a great international success and has been translated into several languages. "Between first discovering the Newark Bears and the Brooklyn Dodgers at seven or eight and first looking into Conrad's Lord Jim at age eighteen, I had done some growing up. I am only saying that my discovery of literature, and fiction particularly, and the 'love affair' - to some degree hopeless, but still earnest - that has ensued, derives in part from this childhood infatuation with baseball. Or, more accurately perhaps, baseball - with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategies, its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its 'characters', its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate - was the literature of my boyhood." (Roth in 'My Baseball Years', from Reading Myself and Others, 1975) Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, which became the scene for his early novels. His father was an insurance salesman of Austro-Hungarian stock. Roth attended Rutgers University for a year before transferring to Bucknell University. He studied at the University of Chicago, receiving his M.A. in English. In 1955 Roth joined the army but was discharged after an injury during basic training period. Roth continued his studies in Chicago, and worked from 1955 to 1957 as an English teacher. He dropped out of the Ph.D. program in 1959 and started to write film reviews for the New Republic. In the same year appeared his novella, Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award. The turning point in Roth's career was in 1969, when Portnoy's Complaint became the number one best-seller and movie version of Goodbye, Columbus was released. "What I'm saying, Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds - as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America - maybe that's more like it. Columbus, Captain Smith, Governor Winthorp, General Washington - now Portnoy." (from Portnoy's Complaint) From 1960s Roth has worked among others at State University of Iowa, Princeton, State University of New York, University of Pennsylvania. Since 1988 he was Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, New York. Roth's awards include Guggenheim fellowship (1959), National Book award (1960), Rockefeller fellowship (1966), National Book Critics Circle award (1988, 1992), and PEN-Faulkner award (1993). "Publishing a book is like taking a suitcase and putting it out in a public place and walking away and leaving it there... There is no way a writer can control what happens to his book when it is out in the world." (Roth in the television document Mein Leben als Philip Roth, dir. by Christa Maerker, 1998, e-Motion-Picture/SWR) In the THE BREAST (1972) Roth's hero, David Kepes, finds himself transformed into a massive female breast. Kepesh appears also in THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE (1977), which choricled his life to the age of 34, and THE DYING ANIMAL (2001), in which he has an affair with his student. "This novel ? which takes its title from Yeats's lines, "Consume my heart away; sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal" ? wants to address the big subjects of mortality and the emotional fallout of the 1960's, but after the large social canvas of Mr. Roth's postwar trilogy ("American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain"), it feels curiously flimsy and synthetic." (Michico Kakutani in The New York Times, May 8, 2001) Another veteran character, Nathan Zuckerman, is involved in several love affairs in MY LIFE AS A MAN (1975). He has appeared as the author's mouthpiece in subsequent novels, including I MARRIED A COMMUNIST (1998), set in the1950s. The novels deals with divorce, the cold war and the McCarthy-era witch hunts. In OPERATION SHYLOCK (1993) Roth meets a doppelganger, a man, who lives active political lifestyle and claims to be the author. A true incident inspired Roth: the novelist Richard Elman had recalled in his book his seduction of a beautiful actress and his upset the next morning when he learns that she thought he was Philip Roth. Elman allowed her to leave unenlightened. Another subject in the book was John Demjanjuk's trial. Demjanjuk claimed that he had had a doppelganger, who had committed all the crimes he was accused of and murdered Jews in concentration camps. Roth's memoir of his family, PATRIMONY (1991), won the National Critics Circle Award in 1992. A Time reviewer called SABBATH THEATER (1995), about a retired puppeteer, one of the best-written works of 1995. THE HUMAN STAIN (2000) was set in the 1990s. The narrator is Zuckerman who tells about Coleman Silk, the dean of a small college. He is forced to resign after alarming the guardians of politically correct usage. "Does anyone know these people?" he asks about two students who never showed up for class. "Do they exist or are they spooks?" They do, and turn out to be African Americans. And off-campus, with the help of Viagra, Silk starts an affair with an illiterate janitor, Faunia. "Most novelists wouldn't or couldn't handle the variety of elemets that Roth does here. Few has his radical imagination and technical mastery. Fewer still has his daring." (R.Z. Sheppard in Time, May 22, 2000) Portnoy's Complaint (1969) - Philip Roth's third novel, which marked a turning point in the author's career. Many reader's found the book offensive and pornographic because of its protagonist's use of obscene language and sex scenes. The story records the intimate confessions of Alexander Portnoy to his psychiatrist. Portnoy goes through his adolescent obsession with masturbation and his relationship with his over-possessive mother, Sophie. "Then came adolescence - half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out." Portnoy's "complaint" refers to the damage done to him by the culture that has shaped him; although he is successful, his achievements are marred by a nagging sense of guilt. The novel uses a first person-narrative. Portnoy's approach is often ironic and has the routines of a stand-up comedian. The inspiration behind Portnoy has been variously attributed to Lenny Bruce's nightclub act. Jewish family and its values are held up to ridicule. Particular criticism has been leveled to Roth's presentation of the Jewish mother. Roth married in 1990 the distinguished Shakespearean actress Claire Bloom - their relationship had already started in the 1970s. After they separated Bloom published her memoir Leaving a Doll's House (1996). Her 1982 memoir, Limelight and After, centered on her early years and particularly the collaboration with Chaplin. Bloom has acted in several classic or modern plays, including A Streetcar Named Desire and The Cherry Orchard. - Films: Limelight (written and directed by Charles Chaplin, 1952), Look back in Anger (dir. by Tony Richardson, play John Osborne, 1959), A Doll's House (as Nora, play Henrik Ibsen, dir. by Patrick Garland, 1973), Islands in the Stream (based on Ernest Hemingway's novel, dir. by Franklin Schaffner, 1977), Crimes and Misdemeanors (written and directed by Woody Allen, 1989). - Television drama: Brideshead Revisited, Shadowlands, Shadow on the Sun. - Autobiography: Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress (1982) For further reading: The Fiction of Philip Roth by John McDaniel (1974); Critical Esays on Philip Roth, ed. by Sanford Pinsker (1982); Philip Roth by Lee Hermione (1982); Reading Philip Roth by Asher Milbauer and Donald Watson (1988); Philip Roth Revisited by Jay Halio (1992); Beyond Despair by Aharon Applefield (1994); Philip Roth and the Jews by Alan Cooper (1996) - Nathan Zuckermann series: The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson (novels republished together with the novella The Prague Orgy), The Counterlife, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain (2000, Zuckerman is the narrator). - General subjects in works: Jewish-American life, modern American society, sexuality. Selected works: GOODBYE COLUMBUS, 1959 - HYVÄSTI, COLUMBUS - (The National Book Award) - film 1969, dir. by Larry Peece, starring Richard Benjamin, Ali MacGraw, prod. Paramount / Willow Tree (Stanley Jaffe) LETTING GO, 1962 WHEN SHE WAS GOOD, 1967 PENGUIN MODERN STORIES 3, 1969 (with others) PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, 1969 - Portnoyn tauti - film 1972, dir. by Ernest Lehman OUR GANG (STARRING TRICKY AND HIS FRIENDS, 1971 - Meidän jengi THE BREAST, 1972 - Rinta THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, 1973 MY LIFE AS A MAN, 1974 READING MYSELF AND OTHERS, 1975 THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE, 1977 - Intohimon professori THE GHOST WRITER, 1979 NOVOTNY'S PAIN, 1980 A PHILIP ROTH READER, 1980 ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND, 1981 THE ANATOMY LESSON, 1983 television play: THE GHOST WRITER, 1983 THE PRAGUE ORGY/ ZUCKERMAN BOUND, 1985 THE COUNTERLIFE, 1986 - Käänteiselämää THE FACTS: A NOVELIST'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1988 DECEPTION, 1990 PATRIMONY, 1991 CONVERSATIONS WITH PHILIP ROTH, 1992 OPERATION SHYLOCK, 1993 THE CONVERSATION OF THE JEWS, 1993 A PHILIP ROTH READER, 1993 SABBATH'S THEATER, 1995 AMERICAN PASTORAL, 1997 - Pulizer Prize - depicts the life of Swede Levov, a white Jew, who gains success in his life, but whose daughter Merry becomes a terrorist and goes underground. The work was inspired by John Milton's epic poem (1608-1674) Paradise Lost I MARRIED A COMMUNIST, 1998 - Mieheni oli kommunisti, suom. Kristiina Rikman THE HUMAN STAIN, 2000 THE DYING ANIMAL, 2001 http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/proth.htm