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
Blake Bailey s Life as a Man
thenation.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thenation.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
When the Los Angeles Timesasked Blake Bailey what he thought about Laura Marsh’s review of his Philip Roth biography in
The New Republic, he replied, “That was harsh. I mean, wow.” He had a heavier hitter on his side, anyway: “David Remnick of
The
New Yorker says that I’m ‘uncowed,’ that I let the repellent in, that I present an extremely flawed man,” he said. “And if you weigh the reviews so far, most are on the David Remnick side.”
Bailey casually name-dropped the editor of
The New Yorker with the confidence of a man who knows the system backs him. Until this week, he wasn’t wrong: When
The Essential Philip Roth
Looking to read one of his books? Let us help.
Probably you cannot accurately measure a writer or any person until the moment after his death. A life can stretch out in front of you, but until it’s over, you don’t know how the beginning truly informed the end; you won’t quite understand the poetry of the person’s story until its themes match up and you know exactly where and what the entire murky middle was. This is what biography is for. But likewise, just when a writer’s biography comes out, it’s a good time to remember the writer’s actual books. I’ve read every single piece of ink ejaculated over the publication of Blake Bailey’s “Philip Roth: The Biography”; I am Taffy Brodesser-Akner: The Obsessed. I wound a tourniquet around my arm and injected each piece in and floated around in my high. My favorites so far are this terrific Magazine story by Mark Oppenheimer and Cynthia Ozick’s passionate review. I think as time goes o
The Sunday Read: âThe Ghost Writerâ
Philip Roth was his own favorite subject. Whatâs left for a biographer?Produced by Anna Martin and Aaron Esposito; music by Aaron Esposito; edited by John Woo; written and introduced by Mark Oppenheimer; and narrated by Edoardo Ballerini.
transcript
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The author Philip Roth, who died in 2018, was not sure whether he wanted to be the subject of a biography. In the end, he decided that he wanted to be known and understood.
His search for a biographer was long and fraught â Mr. Roth parted ways with two, courted one and sued another â before he settled on Blake Bailey, one of the great chroniclers of Americaâs literary lives.
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