How does a novelist write about the facts of his life after spending years fictionalising those facts with irrepressible daring and originality?

What becomes of 'the facts' after they have been smelted down for art's sake? InThe Facts -Philip Roth's idiosyncratic autobiography - we find out. Focusing on five episodes in his life, Roth gives a portrait of his secure city childhood in Newark, through to his first marriage, clashes with the Jewish establishment overGoodbye, Columbusand his writing ofPortnoy's Complaint. In true Rothian style, his fictional self Nathan Zuckerman is allowed the final, coruscating word of reply.

Philip Roth (1933-2018) won the Pulitzer Prize forAmerican Pastoralin 1997.In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005The Plot Against Americareceived the Society of American Historians Prize for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 20032004.

Roth received PENs two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award for a body of work . . . of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose scale of achievement over a sustained career . . . places him or her in the highest rank of American literature. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize.