Philip Roth, a giant of US literature whose work explored what it meant to be American, male and Jewish, was a towering figure among 20th century novelists whose five-decade career won him legions of awards around the world.
He died yesterday in Manhattan of congestive heart failure, the Wylie Agency told AFP, only six years after he announced his retirement. He was 85.
It marked the end of an extraordinary career for an author who found fame with the wildly graphic "Portnoy's Complaint" in 1969 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for "American Pastoral," whose "Plot against America" found renewed significance under the Donald Trump presidency and published "Nemesis," his final novel, in 2010.
Roth was widely considered the last living great, white, male American novelist, who along with Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and John Updike helped define what it meant to be American in the latter half of the 20th century.
"The death of Philip Roth marks, in its way, the end of a cultural era as definitively as the death of Pablo Picasso did in 1973," wrote New York Times book critic Dwight Garner today.
His more than two dozen novels boldly explored male lust and sexual temptation, ageing and mortality, and while he was not religious he powerfully mined the Jewish-American experience, drawing on his upbringing as the son of first-generation middle-class Americans in New Jersey.
"You can't invent out of nothing, or I can't certainly," he said in a 2011 documentary. "I need some reality, to rub two sticks of reality together to get a fire of reality." Roth won two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three PEN/Faulkner awards and the Pulitzer -- but the Nobel prize evaded him.
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He collected the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction in 2011, followed the next year by Spain's Prince of Asturias award for literature and in 2015, France presented Roth with the insignia of Commander of the Legion of Honor -- a laurel the author called "a wonderful surprise." - 'American Pastoral'.
Two years after he published "Nemesis," about a 1944 polio epidemic, he stunned the literary world by announcing that he would no longer write fiction. "Right now it is astonishing to find myself still here at the end of each day. Getting into bed at night I smile and think, 'I lived another day'," he told The New York Times in an interview earlier this year.
A prolific essayist, critic and novelist, the 1990s were the height of his productivity, exemplified by his widely admired trilogy -- "American Pastoral" (1997), "I Married a Communist" (1998) and "The Human Stain" (2000).
"By 2010 I had a strong suspicion that I'd done my best work and anything more would be inferior," he told the Times in January. "Every talent has its terms -- its nature, its scope, its force; also its term, a tenure, a life span... Not everyone can be fruitful forever." Roth's 2004 novel "The Plot Against America" was thrust back into the public eye following Trump's election.
It imagines Franklin D Roosevelt being defeated in 1940 by Charles Lindbergh, an aviator with pro-Nazi leanings, which led some critics to draw comparisons with Trump's populist sweep to power.
But Roth downplayed a parallel, saying that while Lindbergh was racist and anti-Semitic, he was also a hero for his solo trans-Atlantic flight.
"No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today," he told the Times. "Trump," he said "is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac." -