Philip Roth published Portnoy’s Complaint and became the most controversial novelist in America — loved by critics, loathed by the Jewish establishment, and read by everyone. He spent the next forty years writing novels that blurred the line between fiction and autobiography so thoroughly that no one, including Roth himself, seemed sure where one ended and the other began.

This episode traces Roth from his Newark childhood through Goodbye Columbus, the Portnoy scandal, the Zuckerman novels, and the extraordinary late-career run that produced American Pastoral and The Human Stain.

• Portnoy’s Complaint shocked readers in 1969 with its explicit treatment of Jewish-American sexuality and guilt
• American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered one of the greatest American novels of the late twentieth century
• He created the alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who appeared in nine novels exploring the boundary between fiction and life
• He announced his retirement from writing in 2012, six years before his death, saying he had given his all to the work