Philip Roth

Roth, Philip (1933– ), U.S. writer. His protagonists agonize between a traditional Jewish upbringing and modern urban society. He became recognized with the novella and stories in Goodbye Columbus (1959). His best-known novel is Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a hilarious, bitter account of sexual frustration. Among his other works are the novels The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), later reissued in a single volume as Zuckerman Bound (1985), and an autobiography, The Facts (1988). Roth received a Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral (1998).