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Feb 5, 2021 · The letters also reveal a great deal about the complicated relationship Roth had with fellow literary giant John Updike. “Their relationship is hard to categorize, not a friendship, exactly, nor merely an acquaintance,” Tisch wrote. “For all their similarities—two literary grandees of the same generation, both precocious, prolific ...
- The Beginning
- The Experimental, Autobiographical, and Metafictional
- The Great Period
- The Late Works
- Footnotes
To start at the beginning, though: Goodbye, Columbushas all the attributes of the classic American first novel. It’s a swift coming-of-age story about a young man in love with a woman he can’t see clearly, taking place over the course of an intense summer. It’s also about two different kinds of Jewish families that used to exist, the pushy strivers...
After Portnoy, Roth spent a while trying new things. There were two satirical goofs, Our Gang and The Great American Novel, about the Nixon administration and a communist baseball league, respectively.4And he invented two alter egos: David Kepesh, a horny professor of literature, and Nathan Zuckerman, a strong-minded novelist. These two figures wou...
After Operation Shylock, Roth was one of the most acclaimed writers in America. In retrospect, he’d just finished warming up. He was living alone in rural Connecticut, swimming in the pond in the mornings, reading in the evenings, and spending six hours every day in a studio behind the house, writing in longhand at a standing desk.7 He began Sabbat...
Armed with that voice, a handful of familiar techniques, and an acute sense of his waning energy, Roth, in his 70s, began a series of shorter novels on themes of aging and death. It’s impossible not to think of them as a prolonged valedictory tour: an artist at his peak, turning his powers on his own decline. Two of them say goodbye to his recurrin...
¹ “The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar”—Nicholson Baker, U and I ² I’ve never been able to finish either of these books. I tried Letting Goagain for this ...
- Gabriel Roth
Oct 31, 2019 · As Charles McGrath explains in an essay on “Roth/Updike” that was published in the Autumn 2019 edition of The Hudson Review, he had the privilege of knowing John Updike well enough to play golf with him and Philip Roth enough to visit him in his home. Those privileges came to him because he was a literary insider, one whose essays appeared ...
Mar 22, 2021 · It was the first of nine novels by Philip Roth narrated by Nathan Zuckerman. The story begins when Zuckerman, a young writer who has just published his first short stories, pays a visit to E. I ...
Jun 13, 2012 · The same glass case includes Updike’s copy of “Romeo and Juliet” from his 1951 course with Harvard teaching legend Harry Levin. Updike’s marginalia, in fountain-pen ink, are dense and intense, revealing him to be, early on, the fierce reader who made the fervent writer. “He was a very committed reader,” an exhibit viewer observed.
- Harvardgazette
For Updike, writing was almost as easy as breathing, and the sentences poured forth with scarcely a second thought. He loved the editorial process, the queries, the copy-editing, the correcting of proofs, making last-minute changes over the phone. But he was a tweaker, a tinkerer, not a rewriter.
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Jun 30, 2018 · A writer with John Updike’s (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) versatility and range, whose fiction reveals a virtual symphonic richness and complexity, offers readers a variety of keys or themes with which to explore his work. The growing and already substantial body of criticism Updike’s work has engendered, therefore, reflects a ...
