Back Novels 1973–1977

Philip Roth: Novels 1973–1977

The Great American Novel | My Life as a Man | The Professor of Desire

Edited by Ross Miller

“We now see two things clearly that were not clear before: One is that Philip Roth is America’s greatest living novelist; the other is that, taken in sequence, his fictions constitute a landmark in the history of literary modernism.” — Los Angeles Times

Overview

Overview

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January 30, 2017

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

This third volume of The Library of America’s definitive edition of Philip Roth’s collected works presents three markedly different novels that together trace a crucial period in the bold evolution of one of America’s indispensable novelists.

In The Great American Novel (1973), a hilarious, bizarre, strangely poignant tall tale of American pieties and American lunacy, Roth lifts the lid on the suppressed history of the homeless Ruppert Mundys of baseball’s despised and vanquished third major league, turning the national pastime into unfettered picaresque farce. The cast of improbable characters includes: Gil Gamesh, the pitcher who actually tried to kill the umpire; John Baal, the ex-con first baseman, “The Babe Ruth of the Big House,” who never hit a home run sober; and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

My Life as a Man (1974) is Roth’s most blistering novel, the savage, sometimes lurid account of the all-out battle waged between the young writer Peter Tarnopol and the wife who is his nemesis, his demon, and his muse. This is the treacherous world of Strindberg nearly a century later: the story of a fierce marital tragedy of obsession and blindness and desperate need.

The volume closes with The Professor of Desire (1977), which charts the second sexual metamorphosis of David Kepesh, protagonist of The Breast. Roth follows Kepesh, an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling, into a vast wilderness of erotic possibility. The Professor of Desire is the troublingly affecting novel about the dilemmas of desire that prompted Milan Kundera to proclaim Roth “a great historian of modern eroticism.”

Ross Miller, editor, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. 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 1973–1977 is kept in print by a gift from Jeanne Donovan Fisher to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in memory of Richard B. Fisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-93108296-9 900 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 165 Library of America Series

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Philip Roth: Novels 1973–1977

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