Seminal American Novelist Philip Roth Dead At 85

Grand man of American letters Philip Roth, a fierce and prolific talent who achieved fame in 1969, has died at 85

New York, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd May, 2018 ) :Grand man of American letters Philip Roth, a fierce and prolific talent who achieved fame in 1969, has died at 85. Roth's literary agent, Andrew Wylie, told US media that the writer died Tuesday of congestive heart failure.

The New Yorker magazine and the New York Times had both reported the death of Roth, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his acclaimed novel "American Pastoral". Roth, who lived in New York and Connecticut, was best known for mining the Jewish-American experience in his more than 30 novels.

Roth said he reached a turning point when he realized he could use his own world as literary raw material, be it his upbringing or the setting of his New Jersey home town.

"You can't invent out of nothing, or I can't certainly," he said in a 2011 documentary.

"I need some reality, to rub two sticks of reality together to get a fire of reality." But Roth's giant stature on the post-World War II literary scene stems from the universality of his message -- in his own words: "I don't write Jewish, I write American." A contemporary of Don DeLillo, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, the late novelist was the doyen of a whole literary era.

He won numerous US literary prizes including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three PEN/Faulkner awards, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction but the Nobel prize evaded him.