Results: Author Philip Roth Dies
Published on 05/24/2018
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1.
1.
Philip Roth, the Pulitzer prize winning novelist, best known for Portnoy's Complaint, has died at 85. How many of his novels did you read?
Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
5%
107 votes
Portnoy's Complaint
9%
180 votes
I Married A Communist
3%
58 votes
American Pastoral
2%
39 votes
The Human Stain
4%
73 votes
The Plot Against America
2%
41 votes
Everyman
1%
24 votes
Nemesis
2%
36 votes
Sabbath's Theater
1%
26 votes
The Dying Animal
1%
21 votes
Indignation
1%
20 votes
The Ghost Writer
3%
62 votes
When She Was Good
2%
36 votes
Zuckerman Bound
1%
22 votes
The Counterlife
1%
17 votes
Operation Shylock: A Confession
1%
18 votes
Our Gang
1%
28 votes
Exit Ghost
1%
15 votes
The Breast
1%
16 votes
My Life As A Man
2%
32 votes
The Great American Novel
2%
49 votes
The Professor Of Desire
1%
16 votes
None of them
86%
1753 votes
All
3%
63 votes
2.
2.
Roth was a fearless writer, whose work often reflected Jewish life and male sexual identity, and often explored the human need to demolish, to challenge, to oppose, to pull apart. Nothing was off limits or sacred to Roth, and some of his work may even seem rather misogynistic. His central protagonist was often a novelist, one who seemed to resemble Philip Roth greatly. His legacy in writing will be his mastery in what is known as 'metafiction.', fiction about the writing of fiction -- it is a form of literature that emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the reader to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Shakespeare did it, and many writers employ this technique, but none did so with as much commercial and critical success as Roth. Have you read any of these books by other writers who employed this form of writing?
Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes
14%
289 votes
Misery, Stephen King
26%
533 votes
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
15%
315 votes
Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut
13%
274 votes
Nowhere Near Milkwood, Rhys Hughes
3%
53 votes
1982, Janine, Alasdair Gray
3%
65 votes
Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis
2%
32 votes
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
21%
437 votes
None
61%
1247 votes
3.
3.
Of course, no survey about a writer could be complete without some quotes -- examples of his craft. How many of these do you like?
"He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense." -- American Pastoral
9%
178 votes
"Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up." -- The Dying Animal
19%
381 votes
"Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game." -- The Human Stain
6%
123 votes
"--nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others" -- The Plot Against America
8%
163 votes
"How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard." -- The Professor Of Desire
12%
242 votes
"You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again." -- Indignation
7%
146 votes
"You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you." ? Portnoy's Complaint
16%
330 votes
"Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them." -- Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories
4%
86 votes
"Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise." -- Philip Roth
6%
116 votes
"You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you." -- Philip Roth
5%
111 votes
All
5%
109 votes
None
66%
1336 votes
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