+ A
A -
AFP
New York
Philip Roth, a giant of US literature whose work explored what it meant to be American, male and Jewish, was a towering figure among 20th century novelists whose five-decade career won him legions of awards around the world.
He died on Tuesday in Manhattan of congestive heart failure, the Wylie Agency told AFP, only six years after he announced his retirement. He was 85.
It marked the end of an extraordinary career for an author who found fame with the wildly graphic"Portnoy's Complaint"in 1969 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for"American Pastoral,"whose"Plot against America"found renewed significance under the Donald Trump presidency and published"Nemesis,"his final novel, in 2010.
Roth was widely considered the last living great, white, male American novelist, who along with Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and John Updike helped define what it meant to be American in the latter half of the 20th century.
"The death of Philip Roth marks, in its way, the end of a cultural era as definitively as the death of Pablo Picasso did in 1973,"wrote New York Times book critic Dwight Garner on Wednesday.
His more than two dozen novels boldly explored male lust and sexual temptation, ageing and mortality, and while he was not religious he powerfully mined the Jewish-American experience, drawing on his upbringing as the son of first-generation middle-class Americans in New Jersey.
"You can't invent out of nothing, or I can't certainly,"he said in a 2011 documentary."I need some reality, to rub two sticks of reality together to get a fire of reality."
Roth won two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three PEN/Faulkner awards and the Pulitzer -- but the Nobel prize evaded him. He collected the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction in 2011, followed the next year by Spain's Prince of Asturias award for literature and in 2015, France presented Roth with the insignia of Commander of the Legion of Honour -- a laurel the author called"a wonderful surprise."
