Roth, Philip

The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be.

Seymour "Swede" Levov, a hard working man who came of age in triumphant postwar America, must give up his dreams of a peaceful life when his daughter grows up to be a 1960s revolutionary terrorist.

Contains the title work in which a Radcliffe girl and a Rutgers boy learn about love; and includes five additional short stories by the award-winning American author.

Radio actor Iron Rinn, an idealistic Communist who emerged from service in World War II committed to making the world a better place, finds his dreams and his life in ruins when his wife, Eva Frame, confides to a gossip columnist that her husband was once a spy for the Soviet Union.

A Radcliffe girl and a Rutgers boy learn about love in the story Goodbye, Columbus.

Coleman Silk, a distinguished professor at a small New England college where he has managed over the course of fifty years to make a lot of enemies, experiences a sort of personal liberation when he is forced from his job on false claims of racism -- a charge made all the more ironic due to a secret Silk has been keeping nearly his entire life.

The novelist tells the story of his father, who created him and whom he recreates in an act of memory, elegy, and appreciation.

A young writer meets the author he looks up to, almost as a spiritual father, and gets a chance to make several observations about him.

Playground director Bucky Cantor struggles to deal with the emotional and physical turmoil he faces as the polio epidemic ravages the children he cares for and about in 1940's Newark, New Jersey.