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Philip Roth dead: Portnoy's Complaint and American Pastoral author dies aged 85

Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth has died aged 85: AP
Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth has died aged 85: AP

American novelist Philip Roth has died at the age of 85.

Roth's literary agent Andrew Wylie said that he died in a New York City hospital of congestive heart failure.

The celebrated and controversial author of Portnoy's Complaint, I Married a Communist and other novels won virtually every literary honour, including the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral.

Roth wrote more than 30 books, including the 1991 memoir Patrimony, which examined his complex relationship with his father and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Author Philip Roth poses in New York September 15, 2010 (REUTERS)
Author Philip Roth poses in New York September 15, 2010 (REUTERS)

In his later years, he focussed his work on the existential and sexual crises of middle age, never abandoning his commitment to exploring shame, embarrassment and other guilty secrets of the self, although usually with a heavy dose of humour, critics said.

After more than 50 years as a writer, Roth decided that 2010's Nemesis, the story of a polio epidemic in the Newark, New Jersey, neighbourhood where he grew up, would be his last novel.

He then went back and reread all his works "to see whether I'd wasted my time," he said in a 2014 interview published in the New York Times Book Review.

He quoted Joe Lewis, the heavyweight boxing champion of the 1930s and '40s: "I did the best I could with what I had."

President Barack Obama presents a National Humanities Medal to Philip Roth in 2011 (AP)
President Barack Obama presents a National Humanities Medal to Philip Roth in 2011 (AP)

In 2017, he published Why Write?, a collection of essays and non-fiction works written between 1960 and 2013.

Roth's best-known work was the 1969 novel Portnoy's Complaint, a first-person narrative about Alexander Portnoy, a young middle-class Jewish New Yorker.

Roth's first published book was the 1959 novella and short-story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award.

Several of his novels, including Zuckerman Unbound, The Ghost Writer and The Anatomy Lesson, feature Nathan Zuckerman, a character who came to be seen as Roth's fictional alter ego.

Philip Roth has passed away aged 85 from heart failure (EPA)
Philip Roth has passed away aged 85 from heart failure (EPA)

Although his novels often explored the Jewish experience in America, Roth, who said he was an atheist, rejected being labelled a Jewish-American writer.

"It's not a question that interests me. I know exactly what it means to be Jewish and it's really not interesting," he told the Guardian in 2005. "I'm an American."

Some critics said Roth's novels exposed him as a self-hating Jew who played on negative stereotypes or generally cast Jews in a bad light.

He would recall the hostile reception at a symposium at New York's Yeshiva University in 1962 as the "most bruising public exchange of my life."

Additional reporting by the Associated Press