The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction-- a work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art. Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the " girl of my dreams" Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy's Complaint. The book concludes surprisingly-- in true Rothian fashion-- with a sustained assault by the novelist "against" his proficiencies as an autobiographer.Philip Roth is the author of 'The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography', published 1989 under ISBN 9780140114058 and ISBN 014011405X.