The Rock Star
Philip Roth and the age of literary celebrity
This piece is part of a work in part of a work in progress with the working title “The Age of Springsteen.” This installment, like a series of others, compares Springsteen’s career with that of Philip Roth.
Literally and figuratively, Philip Roth is a child of Newark. A small industrial city about fifteen miles west of Manhattan, it has always dwelled in the shadow of Gotham to the north and Philadelphia to the south (and is currently jostling with Jersey City for the title of the Garden State’s largest city). But it resembles both those metropolises and a great number of cities on the Atlantic seaboard and the upper Midwest in the general trajectory of its history, particularly in its twin processes of industrialization and immigration. As in other cities, the first non-Anglo arrivals were Irish and German (Thomas Edison based his operations in Newark for a while because it was easy to recruit German skilled machinists), followed by Italians, Slavs, and others. In the first half of the twentieth century, Newark became an important node of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North, from the country to the city. For the last half century, they have been the dominant demographic segment of Newark, representing about half of its population, though Latinos are now also a major presence.
The great paradox in the history of cities like Newark is that they are both deeply segregated by race and ethnicity, even as their urban density means that various groups are constantly bumping up against each other. The key solvent in their urban life is class: for much of U.S. history, a non-WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) identity was, by definition, working-class, which meant shared social and economic realities amid cultural differences. Those cultural differences, in turn, seeded a rich tradition of popular art that includes minstrelsy, vaudeville, and popular music—including, as we’ve seen, rock & roll, all of which were notable for the porousness of their artistic boundaries as they evolved in urban landscapes.
Roth, who was born in 1933, hailed from Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood, a Jewish enclave of the city. His ancestry was Galician and Ukrainian, but his (Ashkenazi) Judaism was the defining label of these people to the outside world. The Roths were secular Jews, but religion was nevertheless an important cultural marker, and indeed, this blend of faith and ethnicity was an important template for other groups, notably Catholics, in defining themselves in mid-twentieth-century America. As such, his background—in terms of race, class, ethnicity, and geography—is broadly consonant with Springsteen's, the product of a similar cultural mix.
But their differences in background are nevertheless significant, principally in the form of family expectations and the reality of upward mobility. The Weequahic neighborhood where Roth was born and grew up was a tranquil island in a bustling city at the crest of its prosperity. His father, Herman, left school in eighth grade to work in a hat factory before becoming a shoe salesman and opening his own shop of his own, which allowed him to rent a house, marry the child of prosperous Galician Jews, Bess Finkel, and have his first child, Sandy (Philip came along five years later). The Finkel and Roth family fortunes foundered in the Great Depression, however. Following the failure of his store, Herman switched careers, getting hired by Metropolitan Life as an insurance agent, where his clientele was Newark’s poorest citizens. In his 1988 autobiography The Facts, Roth had relatively little to say about his mother beyond what was apparently a legendary fastidiousness as a homemaker. But as with Springsteen, Roth’s father was a towering personality who loomed large over his life: “His resolute dutifulness, his relentless industriousness, his unreasoning obstinacy and harsh resentments, his illusions, his innocence, his allegiances, his fears were to constitute the original mold for the Jew, citizen, man, even for the writer, I would become.”
As with Springsteen’s family, there was little interest or support for cultural endeavors; as Roth’s fictive alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, said Roth’s background, “this place where you come from does not produce artists so much as it produces dentists and accountants.” The key difference was an expectation for academic achievement. Neither the Roths nor the Springsteens were well educated, but Roth came of age in an environment that honored academic excellence. Weequahic High School, which opened in 1933, had the lowest dropout rate in the country and the highest number of graduates who went on to earn doctorates. The school’s principal at the time Roth attended was a regular book reviewer for the Newark Evening News; a French teacher there, who held a doctorate from Johns Hopkins, was the inspiration for Murray Ringold, a key character in Roth’s 1998 novel I Married a Communist.
Roth himself was a good, not great, student. After graduating from high school in 1950, he spent a year at the Newark campus of Rutgers, stocked at the time with Jewish faculty seeking a haven from the ravages of McCarthyism. Somewhat improbably, he transferred to Bucknell, a school in rural Pennsylvania founded by Baptists and best known for its engineering program. (This appears to have been part of its appeal; amid conflicts at home, Roth apparently sought to enter a decidedly different environment.) It was at Bucknell that Roth’s literary ambitions first took root and he began writing for campus publications. Upon graduating in 1954, he enrolled in a master’s program in English at the University of Chicago. After earning that degree he enlisted in the army, but was given a medical discharge for a back injury suffered during basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Roth then enrolled in Chicago’s Ph.D. program, which he never finished, because by that time he was successfully publishing short stories—one was made into an episode of the popular television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1960—and developing a reputation that would lead to the publication of his first book, Goodbye Columbus, in 1959. He was twenty-six years old.
In contemporary parlance, we speak of someone who is “crushing it” in a particular field of endeavor as a “rock star.” The metaphor comes squarely from Springsteen’s era of the golden age of rock & roll, stretching from Elvis Presley to Led Zeppelin to Springsteen himself. American literature has generally been considered more of a highbrow affair than popular music. But it’s useful in this context to describe Philip Roth as a literary rock star. Doing so helps us understand the way their careers really did have parallel trajectories.
Literary celebrity in America dates back at least two centuries, to the time of James Fenimore Cooper, whose so-called Leatherstocking novels, beginning with The Last of the Mohicans (1826), were the Star Wars saga of their day. Mark Twain was really the first writer of the media age, one whose stage appearances, visual iconography, and even product endorsements are only a few of the ways he was ahead of his time. But the figure most of us think of as the paradigmatic figure in this regard is F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose The Great Gatsby (1925) is generally cited as the quintessential Great American Novel, and whose celebrated marriage to his wife Zelda, writing-generated wealth, and work in Hollywood led generations of later writers mistakenly to believe that they too could strike it rich. (In 1972, Roth published the cheekily titled Great American Novel, a baseball satire about a forgotten league; he was a lifelong fan of the game.) Fitzgerald’s much-publicized and checkered personal life, which included a long struggle with alcoholism, also parallels the challenges faced by big-time rock stars.
There is one other aspect of Fitzgerald’s life that is notable here: as an Irish-Catholic, he was a cultural outsider—a fact that became an important literary credential, as indeed it has remained to this day, where coming from a marginalized background is often an indispensable prerequisite for editorial attention. Roth, who came along a generation after Fitzgerald (comparable in a way to Springsteen coming along a generation after the literal rock star of his youth, Elvis Presley), was also an outsider as a Jew. He was not the first writer to receive—and be ambivalent about—the attention he received as such; Saul Bellow is a key predecessor. But Bellow, who spent his career as a novelist with an academic appointment at Roth’s alma mater of UChicago, did not quite seize the stage and embrace the spotlight the way Roth did. And Roth really did—in Hollywood adaptations, high-profile appearances to discuss his work, and publication in prestigious periodicals like the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books.
In large measure, Roth’s notoriety was a function of the topics he tackled. From the beginning, he was an in-your-face figure. In Goodbye Columbus, he explored taboo subjects and anti-Semitic stereotypes, among them Jews coveting a sense of gentile gentility (as in the case of Neil Klugman’s longing for Brenda Patimkin in the title novella) or perceptions of Jewish manipulation and pushiness in “Defender of the Faith.” In his 2025 biography of Roth, historian Steven Zipperstein pithily captures Roth’s iconoclastic approach to his Judaism, noting “the sparsity of mention of enemies from without.” Zipperstein observes that in Goodbye Columbus, Jews themselves are the cause of their own misery, “the result of their eagerness to assimilate, their lust, or their outright bigotry.” At a time when the Holocaust was still very much in living memory, such depictions were seen as insensitive at best and downright dangerous at worst. Though over the course of his career Roth would demonstrate deep engagement with Jews in America as well as in the state of Israel, he was relentlessly unsparing in exploring their personal foibles—which often meant exploring himself, which he did in cagey ways that included creating alter-ego characters like David Kapesh and Nathan Zuckerman (about whom we’ll be hearing more momentarily) to plumb questions of Jewish-American identity.
Roth was also notorious for the degree to which he explored sexual subjects in a graphic manner. His 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, arriving at the height of the sexual revolution, was a defining document of the age. Rendered as a monologue on a psychoanalyst’s couch—another hallmark of the era—Alexander Portnoy describes a string of masturbatory behavior in pornographic detail. In Roth’s 1972 novel The Breast, narrated by Kapesh, Roth paid homage to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis by having his protagonist wake up not as an insect but rather a gigantic mammalian gland. Even by the standards of the day, Roth’s fiction as a whole is notable for the pervasive role of male sexuality, leading to complaints in some quarters that his obsession with female bodies amounts to a form of objectifying misogyny.
One area in which Roth was not especially notable or controversial was American politics. To be sure, he was a man of the left—his 1971 satire Our Gang chronicles the comic travails of Trick E. Dixon—but his critiques in the sixties and seventies were of the fairly standard liberal variety among the literati. In his 1989 memoir Self-Consciousness, John Updike, another literary rock star of the era, recalls a 1968 party on Martha’s Vineyard with Roth, their peer William Styron, and other prominent cultural figures of the time, like cartoonist Jules Pfeiffer. Updike was an ambivalent defender of the Vietnam War, which was not going well at the time, and was aware as such that his was a distinctly minority position at that gathering. “At one point Roth, in the calm and courteous tone of one who had been through many psychiatric sessions, pointed out to me that I was the most aggressive person in the room. It gave me pause. On reflection, it seemed possibly true.” Actually, there’s some passive aggression here—the bit about psychiatric sessions is a bit of a dig, and “quite possibly” is not exactly an admission of error. But the point is that Roth was the unofficial spokesman of that gathering, even if he was never at the ramparts in the way, say, Norman Mailer—a truly towering rock star writer of the time—was.
Roth may have been a relatively conventional man of the left in his politics in the second half of the twentieth century. But there’s only so many ways one can be outrageous, even for a rock star. Like Springsteen, he was an exceptionally diligent rock star: he did not let distractions, ideological or otherwise, interfere with a prodigious output that numbered some two dozen books by 1997. It was then, with American Pastoral, that Roth began a striking turn in his development—a turn that involved a sustained reckoning with the Vietnam War in a way intriguingly comparable to that of Springsteen.