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Philip Roth on 2005
Credit: AP
The first major biographical work on Philip Roth portrayed one of America’s greatest novelists as a borderline-sociopathic philanderer. It was hardly an impartial book but it certainly had a claim to insider knowledge. The author was Roth’s estranged wife, the actress Claire Bloom.
The publication of Bloom’s Leaving a Doll’s House in 1996 galvanised Roth into launching a search for an official biographer: somebody who would give readers the facts of Roth’s life from the horse’s mouth rather than that of his former stablemate.
As Roth later explained, if he had failed to appoint an official biographer there was a danger that somebody else would come along and fill the vacuum, writing a biography without consulting him and taking Bloom’s “serious and libelous distortions of reality and her numerous significant omissions as a starting point”. Late in his life he recalled: “I thought: ‘Someone’s gotta correct this story, or thi