Book description
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of
loss, regret and stoicism. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from
his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of
his childhood summers, to his old age, when he is rended by observing
the deterioration of his contemporaries and his own physical woes.
A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the
father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a
daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved
brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his
bitter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women
with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has
become what he does not want to be.
Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century
allegorical play whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.
In 1997, 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, previously awarded to
John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He
has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics
Circle Award. He has 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."
Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006
the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work...of enduring originality
and consummate craftmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for
achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of
achievement over a sustained career...places him or her in the highest
rank of American literature.'
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published
in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The
last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
