In Roth’s final years, he often met Mia Farrow at his favorite Connecticut restaurant, the West Street Grill in Litchfield. The owners, Charlie Kafferman and James O’Shea (standing in back), were old friends.

  (COURTESY OF MIA FARROW)

  Roth’s eighty-fifth birthday, his last, was celebrated at his old friend Judith Thurman’s house on the Upper East Side. Roth is holding a photo of Joe DiMaggio given to him by Don DeLillo, another guest; Mia Farrow is at Roth’s right.

  (COURTESY OF JOEL CONARROE)

  One of the last photos taken of Roth, on April 22, 2018, exactly a month before his death. He was delighted by Lisa Halliday’s toddler daughter, Stella, shown here with her mother during a visit to Roth’s Upper West Side apartment.

  (COURTESY OF THEO COLLIER)

  Roth’s idiosyncratic gravestone at Bard College Cemetery—a boulder from his property in Connecticut, roughly inscribed (after the manner of Camus’s gravestone) by his friend Russ Murdock, a stonemason.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY GREATEST DEBT BY FAR IS TO PHILIP ROTH, WHOSE cooperation was honorable and absolute. He gave me almost every particle of pertinent information, no matter how intimate, and let me make of it what I would (after telling me, often exhaustively, what I ought to make of it). Someday I may write at length about our interesting collaboration; suffice it to say, for now, that he was a person toward whom it was hard not to feel tenderly. He was all but incapable of dissembling his human essence. When he interviewed me for this job in the spring of 2012, at his apartment on the Upper West Side, he began as the imperious maestro—asking me to explain why “a gentile from Oklahoma should write [his] biography”—a persona that fell away within minutes, as he endearingly talked over me (unable to bear my imprecision) while I did my best to answer questions about, say, the Jewish American literary tradition vis-à-vis the work of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth. Soon he was inviting me to try on the top hat Bellow had worn in Stockholm, but his mood went abruptly black when the subject of his second wife came up—the look on his face! As if he’d only just now discovered her treachery, and was mortified anew, baffled and embittered forever. But finally his spirits were restored as we paged through a photo album devoted to his girlfriends over the years: an artifact attesting to the only passion that ever rivaled his writing. He doted on these women and vice versa; several of them came to his bedside while he lay dying, as did I.

  Anyway, he gave me his blessing, and our association was sometimes complicated but rarely unhappy and never dull. That first summer I spent a week in Connecticut, interviewing him six hours a day in his studio. Now and then we had to take bathroom breaks, and we could hear each other’s muffled streams through the door. One lovely sun-dappled afternoon I sat on his studio couch, listening to our greatest living novelist empty his bladder, and reflected that this was about as good as it gets for an American literary biographer.

  The late James Atlas unwittingly got the ball rolling when he told me, over breakfast at Sarabeth’s on Amsterdam Avenue, that Roth was between biographers at the moment. “What about you, Jim?” I said to the biographer of Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, and Atlas shook his head with wide-eyed alarm—the first hint I got of his complicated falling-out with Roth. (A week or so before Jim’s sudden death on September 4, 2019, I showed him the relevant pages from this book, and he couldn’t have been more good-humored and gracious about what was, after all, a painful episode in his life.) My colleague Steven Aronson also paved the way by mentioning to his and Roth’s mutual friend, Barbara Jakobson, that I’d written a good biography of Cheever and was likely to do the same for Roth. Barbara was kind enough to pass this along.

  Once I began work, a number of Roth’s old friends went out of their way to be helpful. Joel Conarroe kept his vast trove of Rothiana—letters, printed-out emails, diaries, programs from award ceremonies, speeches, photos—in a big steamer trunk, with which he left me alone in his library for hours at a time; over the years that followed, he always made a point of sending me incidental nuggets that he thought might help the cause. Judith Thurman and Lisa Halliday read this book in draft and immeasurably improved it with their comments; their kindness in every other respect led to a friendship in both cases. I also became close to Roth’s old Bucknell friend Charlotte Maurer, who devotedly searched her house for letters and back issues of Et Cetera; for a year or so we emailed almost weekly, until my last note was answered by her daughter, Charlo, who informed me that her ninety-one-year-old mother had died suddenly of late-detected cancer. Roth’s longtime lover, “Inga Larsen”—model for the deathless Drenka—composed for my sole perusal a 100-plus-page remembrance of her affair with Roth and was remarkably affable and poised during the often ticklish (for me) interviews that followed. The children of Roth’s first wife, Maggie—whom I call Helen and Ronald in this book—had little desire to revisit the desolation of their childhoods, but obliged me anyway out of love and gratitude for the man who, both agree, saved their lives. Barbara Sproul gave me abundant lunches in her New York apartment and always spoke of Roth with a nice blend of bluntness and love. Susan Rogers also chatted with me for hours on end, consulting her journal along the way for corroborating details. And special thanks to Roth’s friends Jack Miles, Bernie Avishai, and the main helpmate of his later years, Ben Taylor, as well as Roth’s co-executors, Julia Golier and Andrew Wylie, who were conscientious and fair-minded in reviewing my book on behalf of the estate.

  Thanks to everyone on my list of interviewees (below), and especially to those who also sent letters, photographs, and other essential materials: Ann Mudge Backer, Ann Sides Bishop, Jason Epstein, Pamela Forcey, Martin Garbus, Vernon Gibberd, Philip Grausman, Bob Heyman, Ted Hoagland, Stuart Lehman, Gene Lichtenstein, Freya Manfred, Kathy Meetz, Claudia Roth Pierpont, David Plante, Max Rudin, Roslyn Schloss, Fredrica Wagman, and Jack Wheatcroft. Claire Bloom and her daughter, Anna Steiger, preferred not to be interviewed for this book, but were cordial and often forthcoming via email. Others who provided helpful materials or responded to my queries include Harold Bloom, Joanna Rostropowicz Clark, Robert A. Cohn, Richard Cook, Nancy Crampton, Blake Gilpin, A. R. Gurney, Kay Redfield Jamison, Michael Janeway, Cynthia Lichtenstein, William McPherson, Ben Moser, Lynn Nesbit, Dan Oren, Stathis Orphanos, Livia Manera Sambuy, Josyane Savigneau, Rabbi Arthur Steinberg, Michael Steiner, and Marc Weitzmann.

  There are many librarians and other thoughtful people to thank, and I wish I had space to go into detail in certain heroic cases: Denise Anderson (University of Iowa); Andre Bernard (Guggenheim Foundation); Alice L. Birney (Library of Congress); Jane Ciabattari; Carolyn Cohen (B’nai B’rith); Kate Collins (Rubinstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University); Dolores Colon and Moira Fitzgerald (Beinecke Library, Yale University); Tara C. Craig and Christopher M. Laico (Butler Library, Columbia University); Nicole C. Dittrich (Syracuse University); Susan Floyd and Richard B. Watson (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas); Julia Gardner, Christine Colburn, Daniel Meyer, and Leah Richardson (Regenstein Library, University of Chicago); Jonathan Gourlay (MacDowell Colony); Rachel Howarth and Susan Pyzynski (Houghton Library, Harvard University); Sharon Hudak and John J. W. Plampin (University of Chicago Registrar’s office); Oliver Urquhart Irvine, Sue Allison, Andy Appleyard, Andrew Gough, and Helen Melody (British Library); Sally Kent and Jean Rose (University of Reading); Declan Kiely and Carolyn Vega (Morgan Library); Breanne LaCamera (Columbia University Center for Oral History); Thomas Lannon, Kit Messick, Tal Nadan, Weatherly Stephan, and William Stingone (Manuscripts and Archive Division, New York Public Library); Joshua McKeon (Berg Collection, New York Public Library); Nancy Malloy (American Academy of Arts and Letters); Sean D. Noel (Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University); Kevin Ray (Hoole Special Collections Library, University of Alabama); Trevor Sandgathe (Oregon State University Libraries); Sandra Stelts and Meredith Anne Weber (Penn State University); Gabriel Swift (Princeton University); and Candace Wait (Yaddo).

  Thanks to Beth Schober, the wonderful proprietor of the Hopkins Inn, where I very contentedly lodged while visiting Roth in Warren, Connecticut. Also, I processed a lot of my research during a pleasant summer month in 2014, when I was the Kirby-Mewshaw Fellow in Writing at the Civitella Ranieri castle in Umbertide, Italy, and the same goes for the previous autumn as a Meymandi Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Durham, North Carolina.

  Throughout I was guided by my brilliant editor at Norton, Matt Weiland. Thanks also to my incredibly scrupulous copy editor, Trent Duffy.

  I can hardly say enough about my sage, sweet-natured agent, Shane Salerno, who has worked so hard to see that this book is launched properly into the world. I’m also grateful to my friend David McCormick for many past favors I’ll never forget.

  Loving gratitude, as ever, to my wife, Mary, and our wonderful daughter, Amelia, who let me go away to a castle in Italy and libraries all over the world because they love me and have, besides, their own stuff to do.

  NOTES

  DURING THE Y EARS I WORKED ON THIS BIOGRAPHY, THE Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress—where the bulk of Philip Roth’s papers are preserved—became a home away from home. Each day, during my visits, I’d begin by filling out another card, requesting my allotment of boxes, which a librarian would cart out to my table. At some point Roth informed me that he’d made a recent donation of papers that had yet to be catalogued, so the next time I visited Washington I asked a librarian whether I could venture into the main storage area and have a look at these new materials. The librarian escorted me back amid the vast columns of boxes until, after a few turns, we paused: “This is the Philip Roth stuff,” he said, indicating a vista that put me in mind of the final, lingering crane shot in Citizen Kane—that is, if Kane were not a maniacally acquisitive tycoon but rather an obsessive novelist who’d written multiple drafts of his thirty-one published books and never mind all the unpublished books that had expired after five or ten or hundreds of unavailing pages.

  In addition to this mother lode, Roth had his own “miles of files” (as he told the BBC) at home, and these he excavated during the early years of our collaboration. After examining the contents of a given file, Roth would type a little (or long) memo, attach it, and mail me the file in an envelope double-sealed with a thick strip of translucent brown tape (lest a bookish post-person notice the august name stamped on the envelope and let curiosity get the better of her). These materials are indicated in the notes below with the abbreviation PRPP—Philip Roth’s personal papers—some of which will eventually be relinquished to the Library of Congress; it was Roth’s wish that they remain sealed to the public until 2050.

  When I quote one of Roth’s memos to me, I give a citation below only in the following cases: (a) where the source is ambiguous and I want to emphasize that Roth himself is the source (“PR—memo”), or (b) where I quote from one of two unpublished Roth manuscripts, “Notes for My Biographer” and “Notes on a Slander-Monger”—the first a 295-page rebuttal of Claire Bloom’s Leaving a Doll’s House, and the second a longer, randomly paginated mélange of thoughts mostly provoked by Ross Miller’s taped interviews with Roth’s friends and family; Miller returned most of these tapes to Roth when they parted ways. It’s possible neither “Notes for My Biographer” nor “Notes on a Slander-Monger” will ever see the light of day, even after a thirty-year embargo, but in any case I think it’s important that the reader know when quotations are derived from such adversarial documents.

  Other unattributed quotations come from interviews conducted by Blake Bailey, Ross Miller, Harry Maurer, Lisa Halliday, and Judith Thurman; I transcribed the interviews conducted by Miller et al. from audiocassettes and CDs provided to me by Roth.

  INTERVIEWS

  Blake Bailey’s interviews: Enrico Adelman, 13 April 2013; Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., 20 November 2013; Al Alvarez, 7 July 2013; Anne Alvarez, 7 July 2013; Matthew Andresino, 30 March 2013; Don Aronson, 20 May 2014; Linda Asher, 1 May 2013; James Atlas, 29 April 2013; Bernard Avishai, 28 October 2013, 7 November 2013; Ann Mudge Backer, 16 August 2012, 27 August 2012, 15 October 2012; Marilyn Lerner Becker, 16 November 2012; Janis Freedman Bellow, 17 January 2015; Ann Sides Bishop, 21 February 2014; Anne Bolton Borchardt, 20 February 2014; Georges Borchardt, 20 February 2014; Leon Botstein, 14 September 2014; Alfred Brendel, 7 July 2013; Jonathan Brent, 31 March 2014, 3 April 2014; Robert Brustein, 30 May 2013, 12 October 2013; Amy Buxbaum, 21 May 2013; Peter Carberry, 25 February 2014; Martin Castelbaum, 3 October 2014, 15 October 2014; Susan Cheever, 21 September 2014; Nancy Chilton, 12 May 2014; Martha Clarke, 23 May 2013; Don Cole, 9 May 2013; Joel Conarroe, 31 July 2012, 7 December 2012; Elizabeth Del Tufo, 26 July 2012; Diane——(Roth and Maggie’s friend c. 1956–1957), 3 December 2012; Judith Dunford, 29 March 2013; Jason Epstein, 15 October 2013; Louise Erdrich, 26 May 2015; Shelly Estrin, 6 November 2013; Mia Farrow, 29 June 2015; Judy Feiffer, 20 September 2014; Jules Feiffer, 27 November 2012; Seymour Feldman, 18 December 2014; Sunya Lerner Felburg, 13 December 2012; Edward Finkel, 5 February 2016; Nancy Finkelstein, 5 August 2013; Frances FitzGerald, 17 February 2015; Pamela Forcey, 24 January 2015; Ralph Freedman, 21 August 2014; Betty Fussell, 18 April 2013; Martin Garbus, 10 December 2012; Harry Garvin, 11 October 2012; Arthur Geffen, 25 January 2013; Vernon Gibberd, 2 August 2013, 5 August 2013; Julia Golier, 17 April 2015; Mary Lou Golier, 3 April 2014; Alice Gordon, 16 July 2014; Philip Grausman, 17 May 2013; Francine du Plessix Gray, 22 March 2013; Eileen Lerner Greenberg, 10 June 2013; Martin Greenberg, 31 August 2014; Philip Greiss, 31 October 2015, 1 November 2015; Paul Groffsky, 5 March 2013; Herb Haber, 8 February 2013; Lisa Halliday, 15 October 2012, 14 October 2015; David Hare, 30 March 2015; Michael Herr, 16 February 2014, 22 February 2014; Robert Heyman, 3 July 2012, 24 September 2012; Edward Hoagland, 30 August 2014; Douglas Hobbie, 14 December 2012; Judy Hudson, 20 September 2014; Susan Jacoby, 17 August 2012; Barbara Jakobson, 13 October 2012, 9 December 2012, 14 September 2013; Joseph Josephson, 21 November 2012; Edmund Keeley, 4 April 2013; Penelope Kim, 25 April 2013; Ivan Klíma, 23 December 2013; Lucy Warner Kuemmerle, 10 October 2012, 6 March 2014; Sanford Kuvin, 3 September 2012; “Inga Larsen” (Roth’s longtime lover), 8 November 2014, 9 November 2014; Paul LeClerc, 21 May 2015; Stuart Lehman, 18 June 2012; Alan Lelchuk, 28 October 2013; Gene Lichtenstein, 19 January 2015; Antonin Liehm, 11 June 2013; Louise —— (Roth’s girlfriend c. 1975), 13 November 2013; William Luers, 27 September 2014; Alison Lurie, 24 May 2013; Jane Brown Maas, 11 October 2012; Norman Manea, 16 September 2013; Freya Manfred, 3 August 2013; Dorene Marcus, 2 February 2014; Alexandra Marshall, 28 August 2013; Jane Kome Mather, 22 February 2013; Charlotte Maurer, 16 January 2013, 20 January 2013; Kathy Meetz, 13 January 2014; Asher Milbauer, 20 September 2012; Jack Miles, 16 January 2014; “Burt Miller” (Maggie’s first husband), 3 March 2013; “Ronald Miller” (Maggie’s son), 1 February 2013, 6 February 2013; “Helen Miller” (Maggie’s daughter), 27 July 2013, 17 August 2013, 24 August 2013, 7 September 2013, 22 November 2015; Julian Mitchell, 8 July 2015; Lori Monson, 16 July 2014; Honor Moore, 28 April 2013; Russ Murdock, 16 August 2018; Alana Newhouse, 7 March 2014; Russell Oberlin, 24 October 2013; Edna O’Brien, 22 March 2013; Cynthia Ozick, 1 August 2013; Claudia Roth Pierpont, 13 March 2015; Robert Pincus-Witten, 22 August 2013; David Plante, 18 September 2013; Elizabeth Pochoda, 26 September 2013, 4 October 2013; Christopher Prevatt, 9 May 2014; David Ray, 2 May 2013; David Rieff, 13 October 2012; Mary Elsie Robertson, 1 March 2013; Bernard Rodgers, 17 November 2015; Susan Fox Rogers, 26 September 2014, 14 October 2014, 20 October 2014, 24 October 2014; Alane Rollings, 2 April 2013; Joan Roth, 19 November 2012; Edward Rothstein, 7 November 2014; Max Rudin, 18 June 2012, 13 September 2013; Roslyn Schloss, 29 August 2015; Dr. Stanley Schneller, 16 July 2018; Gaia Servadio, 28 December 2012, 29 December 2012, 7 July 2013; Howard Silver, 13 November 2013; Dorothy Brand Slapcoff, 20 June 2013; Barbara Sproul, 8 December 2012, 21 March 2013, 14 September 2013; Ruth Green Stamler, 26 January 2015; Rose Styron, 20 October 2012; Tony Sylvester, 3 November 2014; Barry Targan, 9 February 2013; Benjamin Taylor, 6 November 2014, 13 October 2015; Judith Thurman, 14 July 2012; Sylvia Tumin, 20 July 2012; Anne Komisar Valentine, 28 September 2012, 3 October 2012; Peter Valentine, 28 September 2012; Catherine von Klitzing, 9 March 2014, 15 May 2015; Fredrica Wagman, 15 September 2013; Nela Wagman, 29 January 2014; Dan Wakefield, 19 October 2012; Martin Weich, 9 July 2012, 19 July 2012; Barbara Klein Weisman, 10 June 2013; Marc Weitzmann, 1 May 2014; Jack Wheatcroft, 16 December 2012, 17 December 2012; Diane Williams, 20 May 2015; “Kaysie Wimberly,” 13 July 2012; Joan Wortis, 3 May 2013; Andrew Wylie, 14 October 2016; Alan Yentob, 8 July 2013.

  Blake Bailey’s interviews with Philip Roth: 6–12 July 2012, 11–14 October 2012, 7 December 2012, 10 December 2012; 29 April 2013, 15 September 2013; 25 May 2014; 13 March 2015, 14 May 2015, 14 October 2015; 17 October 2016; 18 May 2017.

  Lisa Halliday’s interviews: Al Alvarez, 19 July 2007; Alain Finkielkraut, 1 July 2007; Hermione Lee, 26 September 2007.

  Harry Maurer’s interviews: Joanna Rostropowicz Clark, 30 June 2007; Clive Cummis, 30 August 2007; Robert Heyman, 25 June 2007; Sandy Roth, 2 June 2007; Howard Stein, 4 June 2007; Richard Stern, 2–4 June 2007; Sylvia Tumin, 30 June 2007.

  Ross Miller’s interviews: Aaron Asher, 27 September 2005; Robert Brustein, 28 July 2008; Florence Roth Cohen, 4 March 2007; Julius Goldstein, 3 November 1996; Robert Lowenstein, 2 February 2006; Sandy Roth, 13 December 2006; Herman and Nina Schneider, 2 November 1996; Richard Stern, 14 December 2006.

  Ross Miller’s interviews with Philip Roth: 13 November 1996, 24 November 1996; 16 January 1997, n.d. [c. May–June 1997?]; 4 April 2004, 6 April 2004, 11 April 2004, 18 April 2004, 30 June 2004, 1 July 2004, 10 July 2004, 31 July 2004, 1–2 August 2004, 7 August 2004, 26 September 2004, 12 October 2004; 5–6 March 2005, 19 March 2005, 28 March 2005, 16 April 2005, 30 April 2005, 25 October 2005; 28 January 2006; 9 January 2007, 9 March 2007.