Philip Roth, fearless and celebrated author, dies at 85

Описание: (23 May 2018) Philip Roth, the prize-winning novelist and fearless narrator of sex, death, assimilation and fate, from the comic madness of "Portnoy's Complaint" to the elegiac lyricism of "American Pastoral," died Tuesday night at age 85.
  
Roth's literary agent, Andrew Wylie, told The Associated Press that he died in a New York City hospital of congestive heart failure.
  
Author of more than 25 books, Roth was a fierce satirist and uncompromising realist, confronting readers in a bold, direct style that scorned false sentiment or hopes for heavenly reward.
He was an atheist who swore allegiance to earthly imagination, whether devising pornographic functions for raw liver or indulging romantic fantasies about Anne Frank.
He was among greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize.
But he received virtually every other literary honor, including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle prizes and, in 1998, the Pulitzer for "American Pastoral."
He was in his 20s when he won his first award and awed critics and fellow writers by producing some of his most acclaimed novels in his 60s and 70s, including "The Human Stain" and "Sabbath's Theater," a savage narrative of lust and mortality he considered his finest work.
  
He identified himself as an American writer, not a Jewish one, but for Roth the American experience and the Jewish experience were often the same.
Roth's survived a burst appendix in the late 1960s and near-suicidal depression in 1987.
After the disappointing reaction to his 1993 novel, "Operation Shylock," he fell again into severe depression and for years rarely communicated with the media.
For all the humor in his work - and, friends would say, in private life - jacket photos usually highlighted the author's tense, dark-eyed glare. In 2012, he announced that he had stopped writing fiction and would instead dedicate himself to helping biographer Blake Bailey complete his life story.
By 2015, he had retired from public life altogether.

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