Book description
Patrimony
, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly a anything Philip Roth
has ever written. Philip Roth watches as his eighty-six-year-old father
- famous for his vigour, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark
recollection - battles with the brain tumour that will kill him. The
son, full of love, anxiety and dread, accompanies his father through
each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses
the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long,
stubborn engagement with life.
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.
