Biography

Only reads novels of dead writers such as Franz Kafka or Henry James and non-fiction books.

Taught at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Son of Bess (Finkel) and Herman Roth. His parents were born in New Jersey, and his grandparents were all Jewish emigrants (from Galicia and Russia).

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for "American Pastoral".

Has been a candidate to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years.

This will come as a great shock to young people, but in 1951 you could make it through college unscathed by oral sex.

With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.

[on deciding to retire, 2012] I sat around for a month or two trying to think of something else (to write about) and I thought 'Maybe it's over, maybe it's over. I gave myself a dose of fictional juice by rereading writers I hadn't read in fifty years and who had meant quite a lot when I read them. I read Dostoyevsky, I read Conrad - two or three books by each. I read Turgenev, two of the greatest short stories ever written, 'First Love' and 'The Torrents of Spring'. And then I decided to reread my own books, and I began from the last book forward, casting a cold eye. And I thought, 'You did all right'. But when I got to 'Portnoy' - 'Portnoy's Complaint', published in 1969, I had lost interest, and I didn't read the first four books. So I read all that great stuff, and then I read my own and I knew I wasn't going to get another good idea, or if I did, I'd have to slave over it.I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration..not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.

You know, I needed my life as a springboard for my fiction. I have to have something solid under my feet when I write. I'm not a fantasist. I bounce up and down on the diving board and I go into the water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout.

[clearing up a misquote] I do not believe the novel is dying. I said the readership is dying out. That's a fact and I've been saying it for fifteen years. I said the screen will kill the reader and it has. The movie screen is the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.