This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading alongside a number of his contemporaries and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually adventurous and stylistically brilliant writer.

David Brauner is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and American Literature at the University of Reading

1. Introduction
2. The trials of Nathan Zuckerman, or Jewry as jury: judging Jews in Zuckerman Bound
3. The 'credible incredible' and the 'incredible credible': generic experimentation in My Life as a Man, The Counterlife, The Facts, Deception and Operation Shylock
4. Old men behaving badly: morality, mortality and masculinity in Sabbath's Theater
5. History and the anti-pastoral: Utopian dreams and rituals of purification in the 'American Trilogy'
6. Flights of fancy and fantasies of flight: rewriting history and retreating from trauma in The Plot Against America
Afterword