Roth, Philip Milton (1933– )

US novelist. His witty, sharply satirical, and increasingly fantastic novels depict the moral and sexual anxieties of 20th-century Jewish-American life, most notably in Goodbye Columbus (1959) and Portnoy's Complaint (1969). He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel American Pastoral (1997), the National Medal of Arts in 1998, the National Book Awards' 2002 medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006.

Roth's series of semi-autobiographical novels about a writer, Nathan Zuckerman, include I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000), which complete the trilogy starting with American Pastoral, as well as The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1984), and The Counterlife (1993), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), and Exit Ghost (2007). His memoir Patrimony (1991) concerns his father's death. The novels I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000) complete the trilogy starting with American Pastoral. Other novels include The Dying Animal (2001), The Plot Against America (2004), and Everyman (2006).