Philip Roth

Born on March 19, 1933 in Newark (New Jersey), Philip Milton Roth was the son of a marriage of descendants of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. After graduating from high school at the age of 16, Roth went to Bucknell University where he majored in English. He started a Ph.D. in Philosophy, which he never finished. After a Master of Literature from the University of Chicago, he worked for a time as an instructor in the university’s writing program. Later, he went on to teach creative writing at the University of Iowa, Princeton, and Pennsylvania.

On the Chicago campus he met the novelist Saul Bellow and Margaret Martinson, who would become his first wife, although he separated from her in 1963, and died in a car accident in 1968. He was inspired by her for several relevant female characters in his construction site. His first book, “Goodbye, Columbus”, which compiles five short stories and a short novel, won the National Book Award in 1960. After the unsuccessful “Letting Go” and “When she was good”, he won the third ” Portnoy’s Complaint”, 1969.

As a general rule, he did not have much luck when his works were adapted to the screen. One of his stories led to the 1960 feature film  Battle of Blood Island , a little-known war drama. Then another led to a chapter of the series  Alfred Hitchcock Presents . Larry Peerce adapted  Sexual Complicity in 1969 , where  Ali MacGraw  plays a woman who maintains a relationship with a man very different from her, played by  Richard Benjamin . This same actor also starred in the adaptation of the aforementioned  Portnoy’s Complaint , which went unnoticed.

The poor results of the very veteran Robert Benton are striking when he adapted one of his best novels,  The Human Stain , with  Anthony Hopkins  and  Nicole Kidman leading  the cast, as a university professor and a younger woman with whom he begins to live an affair. erotica. But Ewan McGregor , who made his debut as a director with  Pastoral Americana , for many the author’s best text, but which in cinema gave rise to an overly pretentious narrative, failed even more   so. James Schamus , regular screenwriter and producer of  Ang Lee films , also did not fare well  with his debut film,  Outrage . 

Thus, it would be said that the best adapter of  Philip Roth  to the cinema has been the Spanish  Isabel Coixet , who brought “The Dying Animal” to the cinema, in  Elegy , with  Ben Kingsley  and  Penélope Cruz , as a university professor and the student the one that seduces Despite everything, it is not one of the director’s best works, despite dealing with topics of unquestionable interest, such as the boredom of Western intellectuals.

In 2012 he announced that he was retiring. That same year she received the Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras. “Reading has replaced the pleasure of writing and constitutes the main stimulus of my intellectual life,” she later said in an interview.