The Early Fiction of Philip Roth

Philip Roth is perhaps the most important and popular living writer of America. He is a prolific writer and has written more than twenty three novels besides a play and critical essays. He won National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus (1959), National Book Critic Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and again for Patrimony (1991), the Pen/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater (1995), the Pulitzer prize for American Pastoral 1997, and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998). In the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. In 2002 he received the highest award of the American academy of arts and letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004" and was named a Best Book of the Year by New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Chicago-Sun Times, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, Time, Newsweek, and numerous other periodicals. In the United Kingdom, The Plot Against America won the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six year history of the prize to win it twice.