Philip Roth

Roth grew up in Newark's Jewish Weequahic neighborhood, studied at Bucknell and the University of Chicago, and won the National Book Award for his debut, Goodbye, Columbus, before he turned thirty. Portnoy's Complaint, a confession delivered entirely to a psychoanalyst, made him notorious a decade later, a bestseller that also drew accusations of self-hatred from Jewish critics who felt betrayed by its comedy.

His marriage to the actress Claire Bloom ended in a public and bitter divorce; her memoir accused him of cruelty, and he spent much of his later career deflecting the record through invented alter egos, chiefly the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. American Pastoral, the first novel in that late run, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

In 2012, at seventy-nine, he announced he had stopped writing fiction entirely; he died six years later.