Philip Roth books

American Trilogy Reading Order

Anthologies

David Kepesh Reading Order

Nathan Zuckerman Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Roth published his first book in 1959 and his last in 2010, and the career that unfolded across those fifty years is one of the most sustained in American literary history. He wrote about sex and politics and Jewish identity with an insistence that often made critics uncomfortable, which was at least partly the point.

The Zuckerman novels are the spine of his work. Zuckerman is an alter-ego novelist who appears across thirteen books, sometimes as the central figure and sometimes as a narrator watching others. The sequence lets Roth return to the same obsessions from different angles and different historical moments, from the early postwar years through the Clinton era.

His standalone novels are just as varied. Portnoy’s Complaint is a comic monologue that reads like a confession to a therapist. The Plot Against America is a counterfactual history in which Charles Lindbergh beats Roosevelt in 1940 and America edges toward fascism. Nemesis, his final novel, is set during a polio outbreak in New Jersey in 1944. The range of these books makes it hard to describe Roth’s work simply.