A great American novelist dies
Philip Roth: A Life Recalled
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The star of 'The Barefoot Contessa' and 'Show Boat' would have turned 100 this year
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Culture How Blake Bailey embodied Philip Roth’s spirit — and betrayed his legacy
When I spoke last month with Blake Bailey, the disgraced author of Philip Roth’s biography, I asked one question that seemed to shock him. It wasn’t the one about what he had to say to critics who suggested his biography of Roth was marred by deep misogyny. Bailey — whose book has been permanently pulled…
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Books Norton pulls Philip Roth biography from print after author accused of sexual assault
The publisher W.W. Norton has pulled its recently-released biography of Philip Roth from print after multiple women accused its author, Blake Bailey, of sexual assault. The Associated Press reported that Norton would stop printing of “Philip Roth: The Biography,” a much hyped, 912-page treatise on the author’s life, as well as Bailey’s 2014 memoir “The…
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Books ‘This man is not going to daunt me:’ Talking with Philip Roth’s biographer, Blake Bailey
Editor’s note: Two weeks after this interview with Blake Bailey was published, multiple women came forward to accuse him of sexual assault and other sexual misconduct. Details of the allegations may be found here. A masterful writer obsessively preoccupied with whether and how he’d be valued by history; a deeply sensitive charmer with a real…
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Culture Could Trump become the first president to flee America since Lindbergh?
This weekend, in another totally normal development, President Donald Trump floated the idea of absconding to another country. Facing dire polling and debtsand court cases set to activate should he lose a second term, he wondered aloud what he’d do if Joe Biden emerges victorious in November. “I’m not gonna feel so good,” Trump said…
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Culture Is Philip Roth the male Joan Didion? Asking for TikTok
On Thursday the Swedish Academy will determine its newest Nobel Laureate in Literature. Until today, that precise conversation — had several years ago — was probably the last time anyone was comparing Joan Didion and Philip Roth’s literary legacies. Enter a new, viral TikTok where a young woman has claimed, “Philip Roth is Joan Didion…
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Culture Philip Roth doesn’t live here anymore: A writer, a stonemason, an American friendship
Editor’s Note: This essay, originally published by the Forward on May 17, 2020, won this year’s Deadline Club award for arts reporting. Philip Roth and Russ Murdock trudged through the woods behind Roth’s Litchfield, Conn., home, looking for Roth’s tombstone. It was summer, 2008 or 2009. The crickets were singing. The estate, a 200-year-old former…
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Culture In first trailer, ‘The Plot Against America’ looks to rewrite the book
The story goes that Philip Roth was reading the autobiography of historian Arthur Schlesinger, when he stopped short. ”I came upon a sentence in which Schlesinger notes that there were some Republican isolationists who wanted to run Lindbergh for president in 1940,” Roth recalled in 2004. “That’s all there was, that one sentence with its…
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