The story of the Philip Roth biography, which is also appearing in German these days, is a convoluted, story-worthy, novel-ready one. She had been the talk of the town long before the great American writer died in 2018, especially around 2012 when Roth announced, to the surprise of many, that he would quit writing altogether. He was only still working on his biography, Roth said at the time.
Roth chose writer Blake Bailey to record his life. Bailey had also written the biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, and had won a National Book Award for Cheever’s. Roth had many conversations with Bailey and gave him all the insight a biographer could wish for.
Bailey is accused of sexual abuse
Three years after Roth’s death, “Philip Roth: The Biography” was published in the USA, 900 ultimate pages strong, and immediately landed on the bestseller lists, also celebrated by the critics. A short time later, however, the publisher WW Norton took it off the market again. The reason: Several women had accused Bailey of sexually harassing them. As is usually the case in such cases: there is an accusation against oneself-not-aware-of-guilt. Bailey has not yet been convicted.
Bailey found a new publisher in Skyhorse Publishing, which counts the Trump hagiographer Michael Cohen among its authors or has published the Woody Allen biography in an imprint. And now the Roth biography is also available in Germany, published by Hanser Verlag. On the one hand, he relocates the Roth factory in this country and secured the rights to the biography back in 2012, on the other hand, Hanser is now doing a nicely diverse program.
Posthumously, there is a certain tragedy for Roth in that his life is retold by an alleged rapist; a life that, as is well known, was itself always characterized by a complicated relationship with the opposite sex. And read all that again on 1100 sprawling pages? The attraction is great to instead prefer to take on a Roth novel again. “Reciprocal life” for example.
Gerrit Bartels writes at this point in alternation with Katrin Sohns about the events of the week that are coming.
I have been working in the news industry for over 10 years now and I have worked for some of the biggest news websites in the world. My focus has always been on entertainment news, but I also cover a range of other topics. I am currently an author at Global happenings and I love writing about all things pop-culture related.
