49 “the smartest girl in the class”: PR to Hermione Lee, 29 Feb. 2012, PRPP.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  50 “at breakneck speed”: F, 401.

  52 “ten or fifteen of the enemy”: Ibid., 327.

  53 “wise guy talk and sex talk”: William Gordon, “Prodigal Son Returns: Literary Lion Philip Roth Misses a Step on Library Lions,” Newark Star-Ledger, 3 Nov. 1991.

  53 “one of us taking the black guy”: PR@80, 56.

  54 “stupefied, finished”: PR to BB, 9 Oct. 2012.

  54 The boy expected a “right hook”: Swerdlow to Lowenstein, n.d. [c. 1998], PRPP.

  55 “I am using the book”: Undated, unpaginated Newark Star-Ledger clipping (c. 1969) provided by PR.

  55 “Eat up!”: BB int. Stuart Lehman, 18 June 2012.

  56 “He’s a wise guy”: BB int. Robert Heyman, 3 July 2012.

  56 “something like the folk narrative”: CPR, 82.

  56 “Phil, the feeling there”: F, 333.

  57 “a figure of considerable pathos”: CPR, 82.

  58 “Philip, nobody understood him”: PR to TS, 1 Aug. [1977?], NYPL–M&A.

  58 “She’s not really Jewish”: RM int. Florence Cohen, 4 Mar. 2007.

  58 “looks old enough to be your mother”: P, 633.

  58 “were as stunned as if they’d heard”: F, 317.

  59 his “other wife”: BB int. Don Aronson, 20 May 2014.

  59 a piquant new moniker: BB int. Nancy Chilton, 12 May 2014.

  61 “Don’t give me that Commie crap!”: RM int. PR, 18 Apr. 2004.

  61 “Okay, Pop,” said Florence. “Irv is here”: BB int. PR, 8 July 2012.

  62 “second- and third-hand Buicks”: HM int. SR, 2 June 2007.

  63 “fifteen minutes by the clock”: BB int. Dorothy Brand Slapcoff, 20 June 2013.

  63 “intelligent but unimpressive”: Arnold H. Lubasch, “Philip Roth Shakes Weequahic High,” New York Times, 28 Feb. 1969.

  63 “a terribly nice woman”: BB int. PR, 6 July 2012.

  64 “That’s a girl, Ethel, you can do it”: NSM.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  66 “Watch the rack ”: HM int. Robert Heyman, 25 June 2007.

  66 “through the ruthless intimacy”: A revised version of this speech appears as “I Have Fallen in Love with American Names” in WW, 331–35.

  67 “This is it!”: RU, 22.

  67 “I spent many Sunday afternoons there”: Bruce Bahrenburg, “Newark Boyhood Fiction Material,” Newark News, 7 Dec. 1958.

  68 “You’re not going to Missouri”: F, 339.

  69 “What took place here”: Mervyn Rothstein, “To Newark, with Love. Philip Roth,” New York Times, 29 Mar. 1991.

  69 “to prevent him from marrying a worldly woman”: P, 632.

  70 “key moment”: Bernard Avishai, Promiscuous: “Portnoy’s Complaint” and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 16.

  70 “poignant abyss”: P, 679.

  70 “The father desires in his son”: Irving Howe, “The Lost Young Intellectual,” in Mid-Century: An Anthology of Jewish Life and Culture in Our Times, ed. Harold U. Ribalow (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1955), 156.

  73 “a complex of values”: “Jewishness and the Younger Intellectuals: A Symposium,” Commentary, Apr. 1961, 350.

  73 “I felt like a Houyhnhnm”: CPR, 114.

  74 “an honorary WASP”: F, 347.

  74 “pushiest of pushy Jews”: Ibid., 344.

  76 “Material which depends on filth”: Anne Schoonmaker, lead editorial, Et Cetera, March 1952, 5.

  76 “One of our friends, a sociology major”: “Transit Lines,” Et Cetera, Mid-Year 1952–53, 7.

  76 “two-page miscellany of putatively witty reportage”: F, 355.

  76 “the philistine majority”: Ibid., 356.

  76 “the poor benighted egghead”: PR to JC, 2 Dec. 1987.

  77 “Thank you, Philip!”: BB int. PR, 7 July 2012.

  78 “They think we’re crazy”: BB int. Jane Brown Maas, 11 Oct. 2012.

  81 “Stop mooning!”: RM int. PR, 11 Apr. 2004.

  81 “a goy drunk”: RM int. PR, 28 Jan. 2006.

  CHAPTER SIX

  83 “She scared nine-tenths”: “The Passing of an Era,” Bucknell World, July 1995, 6.

  83 “from its beginnings to the present”: F, 360.

  84 “life of reading books and writing about them”: Ibid., 361.

  84 “She herself had no more animus”: PR’s remarks on the occasion of Mildred Martin’s receiving the Bucknell Order of Merit, 2 Sept. 1981, PRPP.

  86 “Swiftberg”: RU, 27.

  87 “this is not in the Bucknell spirit”: RM int. PR, 12 Oct. 2004.

  87 “nearly in tears”: F, 359.

  88 “Don’t you know me?”: BB int. Martin Castelbaum, 5 Oct. 2014.

  88 “Get out of there, you hussy!”: F, 365.

  88 “There never was and there won’t be a response”: Andrew Larson, “Roth to Receive Taylor Medal at Commencement,” The Bucknellian, 16 May 2008, 7.

  91 “the color of an Irish setter”: RU, 329.

  91 not “conventional”: PR to Stuart Lehman, 23 Jan. 1955.

  92 “E. E. Cummings reading to students”: GC, 84.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  93 “Byronic dream”: CPR, 142.

  94 “Alongside him I’m John Wayne”: TS, First Loves (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), 205.

  94 “like some highly evolved, utopian”: F, 396.

  94 “Chicago Maxwell Perkins”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 8 Apr. 1955, PR–LC.

  95 “he’d rather we didn’t write”: PR to Robert Heyman, 22 Oct. 1954.

  95 “the course isn’t as pompous”: PR to Maurers, 8 Apr. 1955.

  96 “sleepwalking . . . toward a decent retirement”: George Starbuck, “Wonkiness,” in An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago, ed. Molly McQuade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 173.

  96 “not a scholar or a critic”: TS, First Loves, 193.

  96 “Jamesian superciliousness and pomposity”: PR to Heyman, 22 Oct. 1954.

  97 “he’s always lecturing in terms of ‘we’ ”: PR to Lehman, 23 Jan. 1955.

  97 “Suddenly people began to disappear”: PR, “The Day It Snowed,” Chicago Review 8, no. 4 (Fall 1954), 34–44.

  98 “It’s good, Roth”: RM int. PR, 24 Nov. 1996.

  98 “I’d rather see you entering a brothel!”: PR—memo.

  98 “It took hundreds of years”: PR, “The Contest for Aaron Gold,” Epoch 7, no. 1 (Fall 1955), 37–50.

  99 “I feel skyrocketed into fame”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 11 July 1956, PR–LC.

  99 “lost to all their people”: Charles McGrath, “Zuckerman’s Alter Brain,” New York Times, 7 May 2000.

  100 “sweet spontaneous sensibility”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 15 Feb. 1956, PR–LC.

  100 “almost anxious”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 25 Aug. 1955, PR–LC.

  101 “I mean, for christ [sic] sake”: Ibid.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  103 “Willa Cather I’m not”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 11 Mar. 1955, PR–LC.

  103 “the slaphappy Congress”: PR to Stuart Lehman, 23 Jan. 1955.

  105 “brutally boring”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 3 Jan. 1956, PR–LC.

  106 “You should be damn proud”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 15 Feb. 1956, PR–LC.

  106 “about an old Jew”: PR to Maurers, 3 Jan. 1956.

  107 “I’ve got to begin to work”: PR to Robert Heyman, 9 Feb. 1956.

  107 “the power of a voice”: CPR, 213.

  107 “kind of high-faluting”: PR to Maurers, 3 Jan. 1956.

  107 “he has managed brilliantly”: WW, 299.

  107 “apologists, nostalgists, publicists”: CPR, 128.

  108 “the day they appeared”: WW, 278.

  108 “As for Augie March”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 26 Nov. 1956, PR–LC.

  108 “In the next two years”: Saul Bellow, “I Got a Scheme!,” New Yorker, 25 Apr. 2005, 75.

  109 “I’ve never been so in control”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 20 Mar. 1956, PR–LC.

  109 “ ‘To have a baby you gotta get laid’ ”: GC, 110.

  110 “I’m out”: BB int. Matthew Andresino, 30 Mar. 2013.

  111 “I was learning how things”: PR, “Juice or Gravy?,” New York Times Book Review, 18 Sept. 1994; appears in slightly revised form in WW, 313–21.

  111 “It’s what we use”: PR, “Novotny’s Pain,” New Yorker, 27 Oct. 1962, 55.

  111 “injury existed prior to service”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 21 Feb. 1957, PR–LC.

  111 “very kind, in his gnome-like way”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 29 Aug. 1956, PR–-LC.

  112 “I was flabbergasted”: Ibid.

  CHAPTER NINE

  116 “With that act of jailing”: NFMB, 10.

  116 “Then go back to period of college”: PR gave me MR’s journal and the abortive beginnings to her novel(s) in progress contained therein. The story of how this intriguing artifact came into PR’s possession is told at the end of chapter 19.

  118 “by force”: Email from PR to BB, 19 July 2012.

  118 “I divorced my first husband”: MR’s plaintiff affidavit, 27 Nov. 1963, PRPP.

  122 “messy, usual, uninteresting-to-others”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 9 Jan. 1957, PR–LC.

  122 “John Whateverthehellhisnameis”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 10 May 1957, PR–LC.

  122 “want to be [Betty’s] friend”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 15 Oct. 1957, PR–LC.

  122 “the relation between accident-proneness”: “Dr. Elizabeth van Laer, 47, Dies; Professor of Psychology at L. I. U.,” New York Times, 26 Sept. 1979.

  123 “about a Jewish guy who marries a Gentile girl”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 17 Oct. 1956, PR–LC.

  124 “friend from the goose district”: Tom Rogers’s notes on PR (courtesy of Susan Rogers).

  124 “On the first day of a course”: TS, First Loves (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), 192.

  125 “symbolic religious interpretations”: TS, “The Journey of Philip Roth,” Atlantic Monthly, Apr. 1969, 64.

  125 “exhausted Hemingway stuff”: TS, First Loves, 197.

  126 “like a social worker”: Ibid., 198.

  CHAPTER TEN

  128 “left [Roth] where he found [him]”: PR to RGS, 3 June 1968, RGS Papers, UC.

  129 “[T]he most distasteful article”: “Correspondence: Eisenhower and God,” New Republic, 24 June 1957, 3.

  129 “Miss [Audrey] Hepburn”: PR, “Nymphs and Satyrs,” New Republic, 14 Oct. 1957, 21.

  130 “ ‘But Jake has this wound—’ ”: PR, “Photography Does Not a Movie Make,” New Republic, 30 Sept. 1957, 22.

  130 “from the gleeful ooze”: PR, “Coronation on Channel Two,” New Republic, 22 Sept. 1957, 21.

  130 the magazine’s “butchers”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 8 Feb. 1958, PR–LC.

  131 “a quiet, easygoing, plainish girl”: F, 388.

  132 “just in case Harvard falls through”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 27 Jan. 1957, PR–LC.

  133 “Just now I put down Portrait of A Lady”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 15 Oct. 1957, PR–LC.

  133 “wanted to leave [their] narrow backgrounds”: PR to Raymond Rosenthal, 27 Sept. 1974, PR–LC.

  134 “Thirty-nine Japs had lined up”: PR, “Expect the Vandals,” in The Esquire Reader, ed. Arnold Gingrich, L. Rust Hills, and Gene Lichtenstein (New York: Dial, 1960), 74–110.

  135 “I laughed all the way to the bank”: TS, First Loves (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), 209.

  135 “Those guineas’ll take anything”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 2 Oct. 1956, PR–LC.

  136 “Professor, I know that if you’re writing”: MLAM, 437. PR confirmed that this anecdote appeared in his novel pretty much as he remembered it. “That was my introduction to night school,” he remarked. “You might say to life.”

  136 “a powerful moral document”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 13 Sept. [1957], PR–LC.

  136 “exciting and crucial”: PR to Maurers, 8 Feb. 1958.

  136 adventures “in Jewish suburbia”: From PR’s eulogy for RGS, which, in revised form, would serve as the introduction to a reprint of RGS’s novel Other Men’s Daughters (New York: NYRB Classics, 2017).

  137 “a discrepancy between Philip”: From RGS’s interview with Denis Bisson, who produced a French documentary about PR in 1997; PR provided me with audiotapes.

  137 “literary antecedents”: CPR, 6.

  139 “positively the best thing I’ve done”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 10 Apr. 1958, PR–LC.

  139 “adapting [Yiddishkeit] to modernism”: TS, First Loves, 206.

  140 “I’m just going to go up”: Zachary Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915–1964 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 593.

  141 “Well,” she said, “if that’s what you like—!”: F, 383.

  141 “a disastrous Cupid role”: RGS, Sistermony (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1995), 101.

  141 “very distraught”: BB int. David Ray, 2 May 2013.

  142 “Maggie saw a lot of people”: PR to Maurers, 10 Apr. 1958.

  142 “worldly and glamorous and gracious”: PR’s remarks on receiving the Paris Review’s Hadada Award, 6 Aug. 2009, PRPP.

  143 “six or seven” finalists: Blair Fuller to PR, 16 Apr. 1958, PR–LC.

  143 “The shmutz is the story!”: TS, First Loves, 209.

  143 “watched as she dropped her white nightdress”: GC, 155.

  144 “the only editorial help”: Bruce Weber, “The Gripes of Roth,” Northeast Magazine (Hartford Courant supplement), 20 Nov. 1983, 14.

  144 “for just about everybody we knew in Hyde Park”: PR, “The Armies of Hypocrisy” (unpublished ms., c. Oct. 1972), PRPP.

  144 “all of bohemian Chicago was there”: RM int. PR, 24 Nov. 1996.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  146 “a handsome young man of qualities”: PR’s remarks on receiving The Paris Review’s Hadada Award, 6 Aug. 2009, PRPP.

  147 “to do absolutely nothing”: PR to Mildred Martin, 12 Aug. [1958], PRPP.

  147 “Every surface in the city”: PR to TS, 31 July 1958, TS Papers, NYPL–M&A.

  147 “calmly alone”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 20 Oct. 1958, PR–LC.

  148 “I shall be twenty-five”: PR to George Starbuck, 14 Mar. 1958, Houghton Mifflin Company Records, HU–HL.

  148 “knotty publishing problem”: Houghton Mifflin memo from Paul Brooks to Lovell Thompson, 25 July 1958, Houghton Mifflin Company Records.

  149 “Maybe that was the idea”: F, 386.

  150 “I don’t want a strange man”: BB int. Gene Lichtenstein, 19 Jan. 2015.

  150 “Why didn’t you warn me?”: Email from Cynthia Crawford Lichtenstein to BB, 16 Jan. 2015.

  150 “humor and seriousness”: Rachel MacKenzie to PR, 20 Nov. 1957, New Yorker Records, NYPL–M&A.

  150 “the best thing I’ve done”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 20 Oct. 1958, PR–LC.

  151 “Let the goyim clean the floors!”: GC, 133.

  152 “The stores along Coach House Road”: Ibid., 187.

  154 “which is stupid on their part”: PR to TS, 31 July 1958, TS Papers, NYPL–M&A.

  154 “page by page”: PR to Maurers, 20 Oct. 1958.

  154 “George, in a way, determined my future”: CPR, 282.

  155 “mesmerized each other”: PR, Hadada speech, 6 Aug. 2009.

  155 “great anguish”: PR to CB, 5 May 1995, CB/Theatre and Film Archive, BU.

  155 “awfully small, awfully over priced apartment”: PR to TS, 23 Oct. 1958, TS Papers, NYPL–M&A.

  156 “all the girls [he] screwed in Europe”: F, 386.

  156 “It isn’t fair!”: Ibid., 385.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  157 “such a lurid, pathological”: Mervyn Rothstein, “From Philip Roth, ‘The Facts’ as He Remembers Them,” New York Times, 6 Sept. 1988.

  160 “prove [him]self otherwise”: F, 387.

  160 “Well, Philip has time for his writing”: BB int. David Ray, 2 May 2013.

  161 “leave it on [his] parents’ doorstep”: PR to Shirley Fingerhood, n.d. [c. Dec. 1963], PRPP.

  161 “a scientific experiment”: Email from PR to Jeff Posternak, 13 Jan. 2015.

  162 “more precisely duplicated the autobiographical facts”: F, 391.

  164 “That’s the hook you get him on”: BB int. BCS, 21 Mar. 2013.

  164 “Seven years ago this month”: PR to Alison Lurie, 11 Feb. 1966, PRPP.

  165 “not an accident”: PR’s “Affidavit in Opposition,” 25 Nov. 1964, PRPP.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  167 “We found Philip Roth’s”: PR’s later editor at the magazine, Veronica Geng, sent him a copy of this letter; presumably it’s also included among the vast New Yorker Records, NYPL–M&A.

  167 “adverse or not”: Robert Henderson to PR, 9 Apr. 1959, New Yorker Records.

  167 “Your one story makes people”: WW, 58.

  168 “any Jewish American novelist”: Alfred Kazin, “To Be Jew or to Be Jewish in Philip Roth’s Fiction,” Forward, 9 Apr. 1993, 9.

  168 “Oh to be a liberal now”: PR to Rachel MacKenzie, 10 Apr. 1959, New Yorker Records, NYPL–M&A.

  169 “What outcry?”: F, 401.

  169 “I do not want to compound”: WW, 59.

  170 “his name carries immense weight”: PR to Connie (a Houghton Mifflin advertising contact), 4 June 1959, Houghton Mifflin Company Records, HU–HL.

  170 Reviews of Goodbye, Columbus: Alfred Kazin, The Reporter, 28 May 1959, 42; Saul Bellow, Commentary, Apr. 1959, 77; Leslie Fiedler, Midstream, Summer 1959, 96–99; Irving Howe, New Republic, 15 June 1959, 17; Jeremy Larner, Partisan Review 27, no. 4 (Fall 1960), 760.

  171 “I think he suspects me of wanting”: PR to Bob and Charlotte Maurer, 7 Mar. 1958, PR–LC.