Vigilantly Himself: Artists on Philip Roth’s Legacy

Al Alvarez, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and others remember Philip Roth, the creator of iconic characters Portnoy and Nathan Zuckerman.

1. Intense
[University of Chicago English professor Joan Bennett] invited us to tea to meet one of her students; it was Philip Roth and the stories he was working on in Joan’s class became Goodbye, Columbus. He was very intense and had pronounced views on the department; his wife seemed rather silent. (Chicago, mid-1950s)

—From First Generation: An Autobiography, by Ernest Sirluck (University of Toronto Press, 1996)

2. Prince to My Pauper
On the first day of a course on Henry James [at the University of Chicago] in the fall of 1957, I found myself sitting next to…a dark debonair fellow in a jacket and tie who…looked like he had strayed into class from the business school…Phil Roth. With the antenna of New York/New Jersey Jews, we quickly tuned into each other. …

Phil wore GI khaki gloves inside his leather ones, but otherwise dressed like the junior faculty member that he also was, having been given a job in the College that the rest of us Ph.D. students would have killed for. …

Around the second week of class, one of the students was going on about the religious allegory that underlay   asked me what I thought of this interpretation. I said that it was idiotic to read James as though he were Then Phil jumped in and proceeded to show how eschewing the concrete for the symbolic “turned