In the 1990s, Philip Roth won America’s four major literary awards in succession:

• The National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991)
• The PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993)
• The National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
• and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997).

He didn't - and hasn't - stopped there:

• The Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998)
• The National Medal of Arts at the White House.
• The National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986)
• The National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959).

In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain’s W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year.

In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years “for the entire work of the recipient.”

In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003—2004.”

In 2007 Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey) gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus (winner of 1960's National Book Award), cemented it with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint, and has continued to write critically acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels began with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and include the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997).

Events in Roth's personal life have occasionally been the subject of media scrutiny. According to his pseudo-confessional novel Operation Shylock (1993), Roth suffered a nervous breakdown in the late 1980s.

In 1990, he married his long-time companion, English actress Claire Bloom. In 1994 they separated, and in 1996 Bloom published a memoir, Leaving a Doll's House, which described the couple's marriage in detail, much of which was unflattering to Roth. Certain aspects of I Married a Communist have been regarded by critics as veiled rebuttals to accusations put forth in Bloom's memoir.

Roth's 182-page novel Everyman, a meditation on illness, desire, and death, was published in May 2006.

Indignation, Roth's twenty-ninth book, is scheduled to be published in September 2008. Set in 1951, it follows Marcus Messner's departure from Newark to Ohio's Winesburg College, where he begins his sophomore year.

Philip Roth is one of the most celebrated living American writers:

• Two of his works of fiction have won the National Book Award; two others were finalists.
• Two have won National Book Critics Circle awards; again, another two were finalists.
• He has won three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) 
• A Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral.
• In 2001, The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year.
• In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy.
• His 2004 novel The Plot Against America won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005 as well as the Society of American Historians’ prize. Roth was also awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year, an award Roth has received twice. He was honored in his hometown in October 2005 when then-mayor Sharpe James presided over the unveiling of a street sign in Roth's name on the corner of Summit and Keer Avenues where Roth lived for much of his childhood, a setting immortalized in The Plot Against America. A plaque on the house where the Roths lived was also unveiled.
• In May 2006, he was given the PEN/Nabokov Award.
• In 2007 he was awarded the PEN/Faulkner award for Everyman, making him the award's only three-time winner.
• In April 2007, he was chosen as the recipient of the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

The May 21, 2006 issue of The New York Times Book Review announced the results of a letter that was sent to what the publication described as "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.'"

Of the 22 books cited, six of Roth's novels were selected:

• American Pastoral
• The Counterlife
• Operation Shylock
• Sabbath's Theater
• The Human Stain
• The Plot Against America. The accompanying essay, written by critic A.O. Scott, stated: "If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction of the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won."

His latest book, The Dying Animal (Movie Tie In Edition/Elegy) is about David Kepesh, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college-as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution.

For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.

When he becomes involved with Consuela Castillo, the humblingly beautiful daughter of Cuban exiles, Kepesh finds himself dragged helplessly, bitterly, furiously into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice.

For further reading and literary criticism, try these:

• Alan Cooper, Philip Roth and the Jews (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture), 1996 (ISBN 0-7914-2910-5)
• Till Kinzel, Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens. Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie (American Studies Monograph Series), Heidelberg: Winter, 2006 (ISBN 3-8253-5223-4)
• S. Milowitz, Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer, 2000 (ISBN 0-8153-3957-7)
• Norman Podhoretz, "The Adventures of Philip Roth," Commentary (October 1998), reprinted as "Philip Roth, Then and Now" in The Norman Podhoretz Reader (2004), 327-48
  Derek Parker Royal, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, 2005 (ISBN 0-275-98363-3)
• Elaine B. Safer, Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture), 2006 (ISBN 0-7914-6709-0)
• George J. Searles, ed., Conversations With Philip Roth, 1992 (ISBN 978-0878055586)
  Debra B. Shostak, Philip Roth-Countertexts, Counterlives, 2004 (ISBN 1-57003-542-3)
• Wiebke-Maria Wöltje, My finger on the pulse of the nation. Intellektuelle Protagonisten im Romanwerk Philip Roths (Mosaic, 26), Trier: WVT, 2006 (ISBN 3-88476-827-1)
  

This guide was assembled by booksuncommon.  Any errors are mine. For those I apologize.

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