 First edition cover | |
| Author | Philip Roth |
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| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Published | May 9, 2006 Houghton Mifflin |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 182 pp |
| ISBN | 978-0-618-73516-7 |
Everyman is a novel by Philip Roth, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007. [1] It is Roth's third novel to receive the prize.
The book begins at the funeral of its protagonist. The remainder of the book, which ends with his death, looks mournfully back on episodes from his life, including his childhood, where he and his older brother, Howie, worked in his father's shop, Everyman's Jewelry Store. He has been married three times, with two sons from his first marriage who resent him for leaving their mother, and one daughter from his second marriage who treats him with kindness and compassion, though he divorced her mother after beginning an affair with a 24-year-old Danish model, who subsequently became his third wife. Having divorced her as well, he has moved in his old age to a retirement community at the New Jersey shore, where he lives alone and attempts to paint, having passed up a career as an artist early in his life to work in advertising in order to support himself and his family. The book traces the protagonist's feelings as he gets increasingly old and sick, and his reflections of his own past, which has included his share of misdeeds and mistakes, as he ponders his impending death.
The unnamed everyman, while an ordinary man and not a famous novelist, has much in common with Philip Roth; he is born, like Roth, in 1933; he grows up in Elizabeth, six miles away from Roth's native Newark; and he recounts a series of medical problems and a history of frequent hospitalization similar to that of the author's.
The book was received positively by critics, with The Observer calling it "a stunning portrait of a dead man seeking absolution." [2]
The London Book of Reviews was more measured recognizing "Roth’s writing in the novels of the past decade has been distinguished by a powerfully propulsive energy. Reading Roth, when he is in the groove, is exhilarating because of the way one feels caught up in the swing and drive of the prose as it sweeps forward into the future of the text." Specifically of Everyman though, they recognize "that none of the suffering and death in it is singular enough to move us, perhaps because Roth has wanted, out of respect for his subject-matter, to lay art and laughter to one side." [3]
The audiobook version ( ISBN 1-4193-8723-5) is narrated by George Guidall and published by Recorded Books in 2006.
Everyman is also the title of a fifteenth-century English morality play whose eponymous protagonist is "called" by death and must account for his life on earth before God. About the play, Roth said the following in a late 2005 interview:
The classic is called Everyman, it's from 1485, by an anonymous author. It was right in between the death of Chaucer and the birth of Shakespeare. The moral was always "Work hard and get into heaven", "Be a good Christian or go to hell". Everyman is the main character and he gets a visit from Death. He thinks it's some sort of messenger, but Death says, "I am Death" and Everyman's answer is the first great line in English drama: "Oh, Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind." When I thought of you least. [4]
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John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set in Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. Its narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, including two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain,American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character created by the writer Philip Roth, who uses him as his protagonist and narrator, a type of alter ego, in many of his novels.
Jin Xuefei is a Chinese-American poet and novelist using the pen name Ha Jin (哈金). The name Ha comes from his favorite city, Harbin. His poetry is associated with the Misty Poetry movement.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Operation Shylock: A Confession is a 1993 novel by American novelist Philip Roth.
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk". It is the first in Roth's American Trilogy, followed by I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).
Go Down, Moses is a 1942 collection of seven related pieces of short fiction by American author William Faulkner, sometimes considered a novel. The most prominent character and unifying voice is that of Isaac McCaslin, "Uncle Ike", who will live to be an old man; "uncle to half a county and father to no one". Though originally published as a short story collection, Faulkner considered the book to be a novel in the same way The Unvanquished is considered a novel. Because of this, most editions no longer print "and other stories" in the title.
Edward Paul Jones is an American novelist and short story writer. He became popular for writing about the African-American experience in the United States, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the International Dublin Literary Award for The Known World (2003).
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David Leavitt is an American novelist, short story writer, and biographer.
Old School is an American semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel by Tobias Wolff that was first partially published in The New Yorker as a short story ahead of novelization in 2003. It acts a memoir for a fictional unnamed writer, who recalls his senior year at a New England preparatory school in 1960–1961. The novel explores intertwining themes of identity, class, belonging and literature. It was a finalist for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Howard Eric Jacobson is a British novelist and journalist. He writes comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. He is a Man Booker Prize winner.
Joseph O'Neill is an Irish novelist and non-fiction writer. O'Neill's novel Netherland was awarded the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.
Atticus Lish is an American novelist. His debut, Preparation for the Next Life, caught its independent publisher, Tyrant, "off guard" by becoming a surprise success, winning a number of awards including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Lish lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn with his wife. He is the son of influential literary editor Gordon Lish.
The Counterlife (1986) is a novel by the American author Philip Roth. It is the fourth full-length novel to feature the fictional novelist Nathan Zuckerman. When The Counterlife was published, Zuckerman had most recently appeared in a novella called The Prague Orgy, the epilogue to the omnibus volume Zuckerman Bound.
The Humbling is a novel by Philip Roth published in the fall of 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It is Roth's 30th book and concerns "an aging stage actor whose empty life is altered by a 'counterplot of unusual erotic desire'."
Benjamin Taylor is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012 - 2013. Taylor's biography of Marcel Proust, Proust: The Search, was published in October 2015 by Yale University Press as part of its newly launched Yale Jewish Lives series.
