Philip Roth

American writer, a novelist and educator who taught at Princeton and at Writer's Workshops. Roth was best known for his outrageous fiction "Goodbye Columbus," winner of a National Book Award for fiction, and "Portnoy's Complaint," 1969.

Roth and his older brother, Sandy, were the kids of Jewish Polish immigrants. Their dad, Herman, was an insurance man who spent the first part of his professional life pounding the pavements of Newark, NJ to get overdue three-cent premiums from clients. With only an eighth-grade education, his dad worked his way into management. He was an opinionated man who ruled the family with an iron fist while Philip's mom, Bessie was a gentle martyr to his dad's domestic tyranny. She died in 1981.

After college Roth served in the Army. He was discharged in 1955 and then taught at the University of Chicago while writing "Goodbye, Columbus" which won a National Book Award for fiction and was made into a motion picture. In 1960 he won a Guggenheim grant and went to live in Italy and then England. During the span of his career he scandalized his fellow Jews with his voyeuristic rendering of conventional Jewish mating habits in "Goodbye, Columbus," then in 1969 with the lurid, uproarious and sexually graphic "Portnoy's Complaint." He received critical acclaim for other books but none sold as well as that outrageous best-seller.

He had a brief, tempestuous marriage to Margaret Martinson, a divorcee whom he met when they were both graduate students at the University of Chicago. It ended in a bitter divorce in 1963. In 1976, after a variety of female companions, he met actress Claire Bloom at a party. They lived together and were married in Manhattan on 29 April 1990. She had a daughter, Anna, from her former husband, actor Rod Steiger. They too had a later divorce, in 1994, that was lethal.