Philip Roth

Philip Roth was a Pulitzer Prize winning author best known for his Nathan Zuckerman series of books. Roth wrote American Pastoral in 1997 and won the Pulitzer Prize. He was given the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize, international literary award, in 2001. He was also the recipient of the National Medal of Arts from the White House. Roth was also the author of The Plot Against America, an alternate history book that was made into a television series by HBO. Philip was born in Newark, New Jersey and that town would become a frequent location of his fiction. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Jersey. He would attend Rutgers University and Bucknell University where he earned a B.A. in English. He would then go to the University of Chicago where he earned an M.A. in English literature. Roth passed away in 2018. The Plot Against America is Roth’s alternate history that tells of a time where Franklin D. Roosevelt lost the 1940 presidential election to Charles A. Lindbergh. The new president does not lead America into World War II like Roosevelt, but instead negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. The story follows a boy growing up in Newark who finds that his life and those of his families are being ruined by the changing political landscape.