A masterful writer obsessively preoccupied with whether and how he’d be valued by history; a deeply sensitive charmer with a real mean streak; a transgressive who disavowed the labels usually affixed to Jewish writers, but who wanted his work to be understood in the company of the Jewish greats.
If Philip Roth wasn’t a good man, he was certainly an original one.
Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company
Blake Bailey’s “Philip Roth.”
Capturing the problem of Roth became the task of Blake Bailey, the literary biographer who, after writing about the lives of Richard Yates, John Cheever and Charles Jackson, turned to Roth. It was a fraught assignment from the start: Roth had first chosen a friend, Ross Miller, to write his biography, a decision that led to the acrimonious dissolution of their friendship, and, predictably, the Miller biography to boot. For Bailey, a biographer who had never previously worked with a living subject, it wasn’t the easiest choice of a next chapter.