Philip Roth has died at the age of 85. Here Michael Henderson pays tribute to the American author:
It became a cliché to call him the finest living American novelist, but that is what he was. Philip Roth stands without embarrassment alongside the major figures of American fiction, going back to Mark Twain, and while few literary reputations are set in stone it is a fair bet that his novels will be read generations from now by book-lovers who want to understand something of Jewish American life in the second half of the 20th century.
It is certainly true that only Jewish America could have produced a writer like Roth. And it is arguable that, with his brilliant comic gifts buttressed by a first-class mind (this was a man who believed absolutely in the moral necessity of high culture), he is unique.
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