Back Novels 1967–1972

Philip Roth: Novels 1967–1972

When She Was Good | Portnoy’s Complaint | Our Gang | The Breast

Edited by Ross Miller

“Philip Roth is, unquestionably, the most significant Jewish-American writer of his generation.” — The Boston Globe

Overview

Overview

News | Video Revisiting Portnoy‘s complaints, 50 years later, with Bernard Avishai
March 1, 2019

Save $90 when you buy all nine Philip Roth volumes.

In this, the second volume of The Library of America’s definitive edition of the collected works of Philip Roth, published by special arrangement with the author, the range and inventiveness of Roth’s fiction is dazzlingly displayed in four extraordinarily diverse works.

When She Was Good (1967) is the trenchant portrait of Lucy Nelson, a young midwestern woman whose perception of her own suffering turns her into a ferocious force, “enemy-ridden and unforgivingly defiant,” as Roth would later describe her. A small-town 1940s America of restrictive social pressures and foreclosed opportunities provides the novel’s background.

The publication of the hilarious Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was a cultural event that turned Roth into a reluctant celebrity. The confession of a bewildered psychoanalytic patient thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality yet held back by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood, Portnoy unleashed Roth’s comic virtuosity and opened new avenues for American fiction.

In Our Gang (1971), described by Anthony Burgess as a “brilliant satire in the real Swift tradition,” Roth effects a savage takedown of the administration of Richard Nixon (who figures here as Trick E. Dixon). Written before the revelations of the Watergate scandal, Our Gang continues to resonate as a broad and outraged response to the clownish hypocrisy and moral theatrics of the American political scene.

The Kafkaesque excursion The Breast (1972) introduces David Kepesh in the first volume of a trilogy that continues with The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal (2001). The Breast prompted Cynthia Ozick to remark, “One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture.”

Ross Miller, editor, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut and has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and Trinity College. His criticism has appeared in scholarly journals, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago and Here’s the Deal: The Buying and Selling of a Great American City.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Philip Roth: Novels 1967–1972 is kept in print by a gift from the Julien J. Studley Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-1-93108280-8 671 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 158 Library of America Series

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Philip Roth: Novels 1967–1972

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