The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

by Philip Roth, Tk (Read by), Mel Foster (Performed by)

Overview

The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction—a work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art.
Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the "girl of my dreams" Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy's Complaint.
The book concludes surprisingly—in true Rothian fashion—with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.

Author Biography: In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441860699
Publisher:	Findaway World
Publication date:	04/28/2010
Series:	Playaway Adult Nonfiction
Edition description:	Playaway Edition
Product dimensions:	4.56(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.97(d)

About the Author

PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

Hometown:

Connecticut

Date of Birth:

March 19, 1933

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1954; M.A. in English, University of Chicago, 1955

Editorial Reviews

By offering his memoirs plus a critique of same penned by his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, Roth here undermines the autobiographical genre as he derailed fictional conventions in The Counterlife. Roth lays bare his private life or obscures the really juicy parts because, as Zuckerman says, autobiography may indeed be "the most manipulative of all literary forms." He also manages to beat those nasty book reviewers to the punch, because Zuckerman is the first to recognize that "this isn't you at your most interesting." Bathed here in a quasi-nostalgic glow, the writer's youth and college years are pretty tame; Roth is smart, loquacious but quite the good Jewish boy. The book becomes much more energetic and absorbing when Roth describes his self-destructive relationship with "Josie," a woman who bought a urine specimen from a pregnant black stranger in a park in order to bully Roth into marrying her (which he does after insisting on an abortion), and whom Roth calls "the greatest creative-writing teacher of them all, specialist par excellence in the aesthetics of extremist fiction." Another unlikely font for his imagination was the Jewish community; the uproar over Goodbye, Columbus helped to fuel Portnoy's Complaint and the Zuckerman series. Despite their weaknesses, these reflections would stand even on their own as perspicacious insights by a past master of fiction on a writer's beginnings, quest for freedom and creative muses. With the Zuckerman add-on, the book becomes a unique demonstration of the superiority of fiction over autobiography as an uninhibited, introspective, self-confrontive form. Portions of the book previously appeared in the Atlantic, New York Times Book Review, and Vanity Fair. BOMC and QPBC selections. (September)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

There is no doubt that Roth has secured a place for himself in American literary history, and this book will do nothing to jeopardize that place. Roth provides an anecdotal journey through five stages of his life: his New Jersey youth; his college days at Bucknell; meeting his wife-to-be while an instructor at the University of Chicago; his early writing days, including the uproar he caused in the Jewish community; and his life in the Sixties. Roth may have written "the facts," but they are not the complete facts. The work is episodic, sketchy, and sometimes self-indulgent (as such books as this can be), but an offering from one like Roth belongs in libraries. John Budd, Graduate Lib. Sch., Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

Library Journal

A fine account of the origins of Roth's fiction—Philip Roth continues to be the most vigorous and truthful of American writers.
—Newsday

Phyllis Rose

Mel Foster turns in a flat and somewhat uninspired performance in this reading of Roth's autobiography, The Facts. Focusing on five episodes in his life, from his childhood in the 1930s to the publication of Portnoy's Complaint in the 1960s, Roth provides the listener with both details of his life and a criticism of those memoirs courtesy of his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. Unfortunately, what could have been a fascinating audio exploration into the life of one of the most important authors of his generation is hampered by plodding narration with little intonation and less momentum. When Mel Foster is given the opportunity to lend a voice to one of the characters, his efforts are successful, accurate, and a thoroughly enjoyable. Sadly, these occasions are few and far between. A Vintage paperback. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"The Facts is a lively and serious version of a novelist's life." —New York Review of Books

"A fine account of the origins of Roth's fiction—Philip Roth continues to be the most vigorous and truthful of American writers." —Newsday

From the Publisher