The Professor of Desire

<p>Philip Roth was born in Newark New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans Bess and Herman Roth Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950 he attended Bucknell University Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.<br><br>In 1959 Roth published <i>Goodbye Columbus</i> – a collection of stories and a novella – for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later the publication of his fourth novel Portnoy’s Complaint brought Roth both critical and commercial success firmly securing his reputation as one of America’s finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. <br><br>Roth’s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize the International Man Booker Prize twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama respectively.<br><br>Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.</p> As a student in college David Kepesh styles himself as 'a rake among scholars a scholar among rakes' - an identity that will cling to him for a lifetime. As Philip Roth follows Kapesh from the domesticity of childhood out into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility from a ménage à trois in London to the depths of loneliness in New York Kapesh confronts the central dilemma of pleasure: how to make a truce between dignity and desire; and how to survive the ordeal of an unhallowed existence. Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism A thoughtful even gentle stylistically elegant novel about the paradox of male desire that lacerating passion which may lead to happiness but cannot survive it He writes so well. His prose is both elegant and furious. It can be witty tender and brutal in a single paragraph No one writing can juggle the somber and the ludicrous more adroitly than Roth A profound and commanding book... There is great beauty in it humanity and tenderness As a student in college David Kepesh styles himself as 'a rake among scholars a scholar among rakes' - an identity that will cling to him for a lifetime. As Philip Roth follows Kapesh from the domesticity of childhood out into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility from a ménage à trois in London to the depths of loneliness in New York Kapesh confronts the central dilemma of pleasure: how to make a truce between dignity and desire; and how to survive the ordeal of an unhallowed existence.