Few writers were more devoted to their craft than Philip Roth, even while mixing with the Kennedys and navigating a string of famous and infamous romances. For all his writing on sex and self, the Pulitzer winner saw himself as a socially withdrawn “unchaste monk”. Stanford professor Steven J. Zipperstein joins us to discuss Stung by Life, his literary biography charting the extraordinary range of Roth’s work — from Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint to Sabbath’s Theater and The Plot Against America — and placing it within the wider story of American Jewishness, freedom and sexuality.
