NEW YORK — Philip Roth, the prolific, protean, and often blackly comic novelist whose creations included David Kepesh, an academic who turns into an exquisitely sensitive 155-pound female breast, and Alexander Portnoy, a teenager so libidinous that he has sex with both his baseball mitt and the family dinner, died on Tuesday. He was 85 and lived in New York and Connecticut.
His death was confirmed by Judith Thurman, a close friend.
Mr. Roth was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers — Saul Bellow and John Updike were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century. Outliving both and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Mr. Roth wrote more novels than either of them. In 2005 he became only the third living writer (after Bellow and Eudora Welty) to have his books enshrined in the Library of America.
“Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now,’’ Mr. Roth once said. “I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.’’
The Nobel Prize eluded Mr. Roth, but he won most of the other top honors: two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Man Booker International Prize.
In his 60s, an age when many writers are winding down, he produced an exceptional sequence of historical novels — “American Pastoral,’’ “The Human Stain,’’ and “I Married a Communist’’ — a product of his personal reengagement with America and American themes. And starting with “Everyman’’ in 2006, when he was 73, he kept up a relentless book-a-year pace, publishing works that while not necessarily major were nevertheless fiercely intelligent and sharply observed. Their theme in one way or another was the ravages of age and mortality itself, and in publishing them Mr. Roth seemed to be defiantly staving off his own decline.
He was often lumped together with Bellow and Bernard Malamud as part of the “Hart, Schaffner & Marx of American letters,’’ but he resisted the label. “The epithet American-Jewish writer has no meaning for me,’’ he said. “If I’m not an American, I’m nothing.’’
And yet, almost against his will sometimes, he was drawn again and again to writing about themes of Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and the Jewish experience in America. He returned often, especially in his later work, to the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, where he grew up and which became in his writing a kind of vanished Eden: a place of middle-class pride, frugality, diligence, and aspiration.
It was a place where no one was unaware “of the power to intimidate that emanated from the highest and lowest reaches of gentile America,’’ he wrote, and yet where being Jewish and being American were practically indistinguishable. Speaking of his father in “The Facts,’’ an autobiography, Mr. Roth said: “His repertoire has never been large: family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew. Somewhat like mine.’’
Mr. Roth’s favorite vehicle for exploring this repertory was himself, or rather one of several fictional alter egos he deployed as a go-between, negotiating the tricky boundary between autobiography and invention and deliberately blurring the boundaries between real life and fiction. Nine of Mr. Roth’s novels are narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist whose career closely parallels that of his creator. Three more are narrated by David Kepesh, a writerly academic who shares some of Mr. Roth’s preoccupations, women especially. And sometimes Mr. Roth dispensed with the disguise altogether — or seemed to.
The protagonist of “Operation Shylock’’ is a character named Philip Roth, who is being impersonated by another character, who has stolen Roth’s identity. At the center of “The Plot Against America,’’ a book that invents an America where Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election and initiates a secret pogrom against Jews, is a New Jersey family named Roth that resembles the author’s in every particular.
“Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life,’’ Mr. Roth told Hermione Lee in a 1984 interview in The Paris Review. “There has to be some pleasure in this life, and that’s it.’’
Mr. Roth’s other great theme was sex, or male lust, which in his books is both a life force and a principle of rage and disorder. It is sex, the uncontrollable need to have it, that torments poor, guilt-ridden Portnoy, probably Mr. Roth’s most famous character, who desperately wants to “be bad — and to enjoy it.’’ And Mickey Sabbath, the protagonist of “Sabbath’s Theater,’’ one of Mr. Roth’s major late-career novels, is in many ways Portnoy grown old but still in the grip of lust and longing, raging against the indignity of old age and yet saved from suicidal impulses by the realization that there are too many people he loves to hate.
In public Mr. Roth, tall and good-looking, was gracious and charming but with little use for small talk. In private he was a gifted mimic and comedian. Friends used to say that if his writing career had ever fizzled he could have made a nice living doing stand-up. But there was about his person, as about his writing, a kind of simmering intensity, an impatience with art that didn’t take itself seriously.
Some writers “pretend to be more lovable than they are and some pretend to be less,’’ he told Lee. “Beside the point. Literature isn’t a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.’’
Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark on March 19, 1933, the younger of two sons. His father, Herman, was an insurance manager for Metropolitan Life who felt that his career had been thwarted by the gentile executives who ran the company. Mr. Roth once described him as a cross between Captain Ahab and Willy Loman. His mother, the former Bess Finkel, was a secretary before she married and then became a housekeeper of the heroic old school — the kind, he once suggested, who raised cleaning to an art form.
He attended Rutgers University and Bucknell College before earning a master’s at the University of Chicago.
Mr. Roth had begun to write and publish short stories by then, and in 1959 he won a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship to publish what became his first collection, “Goodbye, Columbus.’’ It won the National Book Award in 1960 but was denounced — in an inkling of trouble to come — by some influential rabbis, who objected to the portrayal of the worldly, assimilated Patimkin family in the title novella, and even more to the story “Defender of the Faith,’’ about a Jewish Army sergeant plagued by goldbricking draftees of his own faith.
In 1962, while appearing on a panel at Yeshiva University, Mr. Roth was so denounced, for that story especially, that he resolved never to write about Jews again. He quickly changed his mind.
“My humiliation before the Yeshiva belligerents — indeed, the angry Jewish resistance that I aroused virtually from the start — was the luckiest break I could have had,’’ he later wrote. “I was branded.’’
