This review is taken from PN Review 289, Volume 52 Number 5, May - June 2026.
on Philip Roth: Stung by Life
Steven J. Zipperstein, Philip Roth: Stung by Life (Yale University Press) £16.99
This Side of Bergen Street
Steven Zipperstein is one of the leading Jewish-American critics and intellectuals of our time. An American historian of Judaism and Jewish culture, he is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University and co-edits the Jewish Lives series published by Yale University Press. Since his first book, The Jews of Odessa (1985), he has written and co-edited a number of acclaimed books on Jewish-Russian culture, from The Worlds of S. An-sky (2006) to Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (2018), and on Jewish-American writers including Isaac Rosenfeld (2009) and now Philip Roth.
Roth died at the age of eighty-five in 2018. Three biographies followed almost immediately: Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor (2020), the shortest and by far the best of the three; Philip Roth: A Counterlife by Ira Nadel (2021); and Philip Roth: The Biography (2021) by Blake Bailey, pulped within weeks of its publication following claims of sexual impropriety against Bailey.
But the main reason why the timing of Zipperstein’s critical biography of Roth is so interesting is because of the vicissitudes of Roth’s reputation. Like his friend and contemporary, Saul Bellow, Roth was widely regarded as one of the great American writers of his generation. He broke through with Goodbye, Columbus (1959), which included his greatest short story, Eli, the Fanatic. Then, a decade on, the enormously successful Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and later his first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer (1979). ...
Steven Zipperstein is one of the leading Jewish-American critics and intellectuals of our time. An American historian of Judaism and Jewish culture, he is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University and co-edits the Jewish Lives series published by Yale University Press. Since his first book, The Jews of Odessa (1985), he has written and co-edited a number of acclaimed books on Jewish-Russian culture, from The Worlds of S. An-sky (2006) to Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (2018), and on Jewish-American writers including Isaac Rosenfeld (2009) and now Philip Roth.
Roth died at the age of eighty-five in 2018. Three biographies followed almost immediately: Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth by Benjamin Taylor (2020), the shortest and by far the best of the three; Philip Roth: A Counterlife by Ira Nadel (2021); and Philip Roth: The Biography (2021) by Blake Bailey, pulped within weeks of its publication following claims of sexual impropriety against Bailey.
But the main reason why the timing of Zipperstein’s critical biography of Roth is so interesting is because of the vicissitudes of Roth’s reputation. Like his friend and contemporary, Saul Bellow, Roth was widely regarded as one of the great American writers of his generation. He broke through with Goodbye, Columbus (1959), which included his greatest short story, Eli, the Fanatic. Then, a decade on, the enormously successful Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and later his first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer (1979). ...
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