For full coverage of Philip Roth’s Nobel Prize, please click here.
Talk about the perfect retirement gift. Less than a year ago, Philip Roth declared that his career as a novelist was over: “I’m free,” he told the New York Times last November. It was a career marked by every kind of honor—a Pulitzer, two National Book Awards, the Man Booker International Prize, and inclusion in the Library of America. For years there has been a readerly consensus that Roth was the most important American fiction writer of his generation. Yet when his 80th birthday was celebrated earlier this year, there was a palpable sense that the public events and adulatory articles were a substitute for the one honor that never came—the Nobel Prize. But now, at last, we can dispense with the annual ritual of complaining that Roth—and American writing in general—was snubbed.