My Life as a Man

My Life as a Man

A Novel

Philip Roth

A "balefully powerful" (New York Times) fiction-within-a-fiction centering on the fraught marriage between a young writer and his muse-turned-nemesis from Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth.

Peter Tarnopol is a gifted, emerging writer, and his wife Maureen longs to be the subject of his work. Their relationship is tumultuous—based on fraud and powered by moral blackmail. And yet, the couple's union is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and scorching truths, acts of weakness and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a fierce tragedy about a fatal impasse between a man and a woman.

About the Author

Philip Roth (1933–2018) was one of the most prolific and provocative American novelists of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey, the city that anchors much of his fiction, he made his debut with Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960. He went on to publish more than thirty books, among them Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. His recurring alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh, allowed him to probe Jewish American identity, desire, mortality, and the pressures of history with relentless candor. Roth received the National Jewish Book Award three times, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the Man Booker International Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. He retired from writing in 2012 and died in New York in 2018.

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