 First edition | |
| Author | Philip Roth |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | death and dying, father/son relationships |
| Genre | memoir |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date | 1991 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 238 |
| ISBN | 0-671-70375-7 |
| OCLC | 21448290 |
| 813/.54 B 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3568.O855 Z468 1991 |
Patrimony: A True Story is a memoir by American writer Philip Roth. It was first published by Simon & Schuster in 1991.
Roth's memoir recounts the life, decline, and death of his father, Herman Roth, from an inoperable (and originally "benign") [1] brain tumor.
"In keeping with the unseemliness of my profession," as Roth puts it in a late chapter, the author wrote his memoir during his father's medical trials. The tone, he later explained, was not meant to be one of anger. "It was more anxiety and bewilderment. This was all new to me, all new to him, and I felt powerless to find a way to help him. We went through this experience together." [2]
Patrimony received the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. [3] It was his second Book Critics Circle Award, after a 1987 fiction prize for The Counterlife .
The book was enthusiastically received. Entertainment Weekly's critic L.S. Klepp gave the memoir an "A": "Blunt and devout, comfortless and bracing, Patrimony is a triumph of unflinching memory." [4] Robert M. Adams, in The New York Review of Books called Roth's work "a major achievement." [5] R.Z. Sheppard, in Time , viewed the book's concerns as ethnic: "There is a great distance between Portnoy's Complaint , with its stage-Jewish parents, and Patrimony, the perfect eulogy for a stiff-necked elder of the tribe. Yet in celebrating his father, and by implication the source of his own character, Roth has not strayed from the long path he has cut for himself: to dramatize the adventure of assimilation in all its anxiety, humor and fertile illusions. As a writer and a son, he has now dotted the i's and crossed the t's." [6] In The New York Times Book Review , critic and future U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky wrote, "In a cunningly straightforward way, Patrimony tells one of the central true stories many Americans share nowadays: the agonized, sometimes comic labor of a family and a dying parent who must deal with all the loyalties and grudges of their past while coping with their transformed future as dictated by the invasive, also benign pressures of modern medicine and its technologies, bureaucratically organized. The struggle that Mr. Roth portrays in often ebullient detail could be summarized abstractly as the effort to keep death as it once was — a phenomenon of one particular human body and soul...It is a spirit that corresponds to the gloriously pragmatic, unpredictable genius of Philip Roth's narrative gifts." [7]
The cover photograph shows two generations of Roths: the author's father, older brother Sandy, and the writer himself, as a boy. [8]
This memoir is included in the fifth volume of Philip Roth's collected works Novels and Other Narratives 1986–1991 , published by the Library of America.
The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set in Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. It is narrated by 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain. 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.
Operation Shylock: A Confession is a 1993 novel by American novelist Philip Roth.
Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, Dante Alighieri's Inferno and The Separate Notebooks by Czesław Miłosz. He teaches at Boston University.
Jason Wolkow Epstein was an American editor and publisher. He was the editorial director of Random House from 1976 to 1995. He also co-founded The New York Review of Books in 1963.
Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic, and editor who wrote for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death.
Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work is a collection of previously published interviews with important 20th-century writers by novelist Philip Roth. Among the writers interviewed are Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klima, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Milan Kundera, and Edna O'Brien. In addition, the book contains a discussion with Mary McCarthy about Roth's novel The Counterlife and a New Yorker essay on Saul Bellow. Roth's trip to Israel to interview Appelfeld inspired his novel Operation Shylock.
The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), by Joan Didion (1934–2021), is an account of the year following the death of the author's husband John Gregory Dunne (1932–2003). Published by Knopf in October 2005, The Year of Magical Thinking was immediately acclaimed as a classic book about mourning. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Larry Curtis Heinemann was an American novelist born and raised in Chicago. His published work – three novels and a memoir – is primarily concerned with the Vietnam War.
Daniel Mendelsohn, is an American author, essayist, critic, columnist, and translator. Best known for his internationally best-selling and award-winning Holocaust family memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, he is currently the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College, the Editor at Large of the New York Review of Books, and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting writers of nonfiction.
Deception is a 1990 novel by Philip Roth. It is a spin-off of Roth’s 1986 novel “The Counterlife.”
Zuckerman Unbound is a 1981 novel by the American author Philip Roth.
The Anatomy Lesson is a 1983 novel by American author Philip Roth. It is the third novel from Roth to feature Nathan Zuckerman as the main character.
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 Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works (2005–2017) is a series collecting Philip Roth's works. The Library of America's aim is to collect and republish all of Roth's literary output. Originally envisioned as an eight-volume series, the revised plan presents Roth's oeuvre in ten volumes. First published in 2005, ten volumes have been published as of 2017, all edited by Ross Miller, except the last one, by Roth himself.
An Inconvenient Woman is a 1990 novel by Dominick Dunne. Its plot centers on the affair between married Jules Mendelson, an extremely influential member of Los Angeles high society, and Flo March, a diner waitress and aspiring actress whose life is transformed by the illicit relationship until she finds herself the inconvenient woman of the title.
John Blake Bailey is an American writer and educator. Bailey is known for his literary biographies of Richard Yates, John Cheever, Charles Jackson, and Philip Roth. He is the editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels.
Book of Numbers, published in 2015, is a metafiction novel written by author Joshua Cohen. The novel is about a writer named Joshua Cohen who is contracted to ghostwrite the autobiography of a tech billionaire called Joshua Cohen. It was published by Random House, and released in 2015.
Paco's Story is 1987 novel by Larry Heinemann. The novel is his second and it won the 1987 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in a major surprise that has remained controversial. In particular, the New York Times was surprised by the win, soliciting commentary from other critical reviewers, like the LA Times.