NOVELS AND STORIES 1959-1962; Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories / Letting Go

Boston: Library of America, 2005. First Printing. Cloth. Fine/Near Fine. Small 8vo, green cloth with gold lettering on spine, archival polyester-protected glossy black dust jacket (unclipped) with B&W photo of Philip Roth by Naomi Savage, green ribbon page-marker, green Lib of America endpapers, 913 pages + [2] Colophon. Philip Roth (1933-2018) is an American novelist of considerable repute. He first gained attention with the 1959 novella GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, an irreverent and humorous portrait of American Jewish life for which he received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.<br/><br/>In addition to the title novella, set in New Jersey, Goodbye, Columbus contains five short stories: "The Conversion of the Jews," "Defender of the Faith," "Epstein," "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings," and "Eli, the Fanatic." It was his first book and was published by Houghton Mifflin.<br/><br/>Each story deals with the concerns of second and third-generation assimilated American Jews as they leave the ethnic ghettos of their parents and grandparents and go on to college, to white-collar professions, and to life in the suburbs.<br/><br/>Roth is one of the most awarded American writers of his generation. His books have twice received the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, a character in many of Roth's novels. The Human Stain (2000), another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2001, in Prague, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize.<br/><br/>SUPERIOR CONDITION internally and externally with very slight edgewear and an unfolded lower corner of the front dj's flap.