America's most celebrated writer returns with a definitive edition of
his essential statements on literature, his controversial novels, and
the writing life, including including six pieces published here for the
first time and many others newly revised.
Throughout a unparalleled literary career that includes two National
Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959 and Sabbath's Theater, 1995),
the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (American Pastoral, 1997), the National
Book Critics Circle Award (The Counterlife, 1986), and the National
Humanities Medal (awarded by President Obama in 2011), among many other
honors, Philip Roth has produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction
writing on a wide range of topics: his own work and that of the writers
he admires, the creative process, and the state of American culture.
This work is collected for the first time in Why Write?, the tenth
and final volume in the Library of America's definitive Philip Roth
edition. Here is Roth's selection of the indispensable core of Reading
Myself and Others, the entirety of the 2001 book Shop Talk, and
"Explanations," a collection of fourteen later pieces brought together
here for the first time, six never before published. Among the essays
gathered are "My Uchronia," an account of the genesis of The Plot
Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that "all the
assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old
democracy"; "Errata," the unabridged version of the "Open Letter to
Wikipedia" published on The New Yorker's website in 2012 to counter
the online encyclopedia's egregious errors about his life and work; and
"The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction," a speech delivered on the occasion
of his eightieth birthday that celebrates the "refractory way of living"
of Sabbath's Theater's Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy
interviews given after Roth's retirement, which take stock of a lifetime
of work.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization
founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by
publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most
significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than
300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in
length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are
printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
