Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer. He first gained attention with the 1959 novella “Goodbye, Columbus” which was made into the 1969 film “Goodbye, Columbus”, starring Ali MacGraw and Richard Benjamin. Eight of Roth's novels and short stories have been adapted as films: “Goodbye, Columbus”, “Portnoy's Complaint”, “The Human Stain”, “The Dying Animal”, adapted as “Elegy”, “The Humbling”, “Indignation”; and “American Pastoral”.

“The Ghost Writer” was adapted for television in 1984, but while shortlisted for the “Pulitzer Prize” in 1980, the Pulitzer board chose Norman Mailer's “The Executioner's Song” instead.

Roth's fiction, regularly set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction.

Roth was one of the most awarded American writers of his generation. His books twice received the “National Book Award” and the “National Book Critics Circle” award, and three times the “PEN/Faulkner Award”. He received a “Pulitzer Prize” for his 1997 novel “American Pastoral”, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, a character in many of Roth's novels. “The Human Stain” (2000), another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's “WH Smith Literary Award” for the best book of the year. In 2001, in Prague, Roth received the inaugural “Franz Kafka Prize”.

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