Philip roth biography blake bailey
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Philip Roth
Reviews
"Blake Bailey’s comprehensive life of Philip Roth&#;to tell it outright&#;is a narrative masterwork … As in a novel, what is seen at first to be casual chance is revealed at last to be a steady and powerfully demanding drive. … under Bailey’s strong light what remains on the page is one writer’s life as it was lived, and&#;almost&#;as it was felt."
&#; Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review (cover)
"Bailey is industrious, rigorous, and uncowed. … Although Roth would not have enjoyed some of the tumult that will now attend its publication, he might have admired his biographer’s refusal to fall under his subject’s sway. The man who emerges is a literary genius, constantly getting it wrong, loving others, then hurting them, wrestling with himself and with language, devoted to an almost unfathomable degree to the art of fiction."
&#; David Remnick, The New Yorker
"[Roth] got to be remembered [in Bailey's biography] as a man: hilarious, mercurial, genuinely kind but fickle and meanspirited too. A man, rather than an inert legacy."
&#; Mark Oppenheimer, New York Times Magazine
"Superlative … Bailey's account is definitive and genuine
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Blake raph by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / Getty
Philip Roth has not had much luck with biographers. Late in his life, furiously aggrieved after the failure of his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom and the publication of Bloom’s incendiary memoir of their years together, he asked a close friend, Ross Miller, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, to take on the task. Roth sent Miller lists of family members and friends he wanted to be interviewed, along with the questions that he felt should be asked. (“Would you have expected him to achieve success on the scale he has?”) It didn’t work out, for various reasons. Roth had wanted Miller to refute a familiar charge, “this whole mad fucking misogynistic bullshit!” that he felt flattened his long erotic history into one false accusation. But Miller came to his own conclusion. “There is a predatory side to both Sandy and Philip,” he told a cousin of Roth’s. (Sandy was Roth’s older brother.) “They look at women—I’m not gonna write about this—but they are misogynist. They talk about women in that way.”
This anecdote is recounted by Miller’s successor, Blake Bailey, in “Philip Roth: The Biography,” his eight-hundred-page account of Roth’s eighty-five-year life, which was published earlier this month
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Philip Roth: Say publicly Biography
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