One of the greatest American authors of all time, Philip Roth has died it is confirmed today. Philip Roth who counts the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize to his name drew his writing inspiration from family life, sex and American ideals and his works include American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and Portnoy’s Complaint.
We marked the novelist’s 85th birthday in March with a blog of his best quotes, but this morning the New York Times reported that Roth had died overnight from congestive heart failure.
His first work was a collection of short stories published in 1959, and a decade later it was Portnoy’s Complaint that catapulted him into stardom with its notorious themes and sexual explicitness. In 1997 he would win the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral, and would continue writing until 2009 with thirty books to his name.
In 2014, Roth disappeared from the public eye, but was not forgotten by his fans. Today we close with the author in his own words from the BBC archive in a recording from 1993.
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