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Skye Dent, Office of University Communications
STORRS, Conn. — Ross Miller, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, was chosen to write a critical biography of Philip Roth.
"This will be the definitive biography of Philip Roth," said Houghton Mifflin Vice-President and Publisher Janet Silver. Miller has been granted unlimited access to Roth's correspondence and papers as well as to his family members and friends.
"Philip Roth is a writer of stunning originality," said Miller, "In the last 10 years alone, he has published seven major works. No other contemporary American writer has so brilliantly depicted in all its compelling detail the relationship between history and place in the lives of ordinary people."
Miller has taught at the University of Connecticut since 1972, and has been a visiting professor at Yale, Wesleyan, Ohio State and UCLA.
Roth, who first achieved fame with Goodbye, Columbus in 1959, and won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997, has published more than 30 books. In October, Houghton Mifflin will publish The Plot Against America, Roth's 21st novel.
Miller, a Guggenheim Fellow for 2004-2005, was recently chosen by the Library of America as the sole editor of its comprehensive eight-volume edition of Roth's entire body of work. Roth is the third living writer to be published by the Library of America. The publication will run from 2005 to 2013.
A frequent critic at the Yale School of Architecture, Miller has also served as co-director of the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, contributing editor at Progressive Architecture, and a consultant to the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Architecture. Miller's writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, in addition to Critical Inquiry and other scholarly journals.
He has received major grants from the N.E.H. and Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts among other honors. He is the author of American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 1990), and Here's the Deal: The Making and Breaking of a Great American City (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which was the subject of a BBC film (The Billion Dollar Hole) and was published in a new edition in the fall of 2002. In 2006, Houghton Mifflin will publish Free At Last: Why The Jews Discovered America, a study of the historical circumstances of the Jewish immigration to the United States.
In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 received 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 has twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Time magazine's Paul Gray described Roth's work as "unfailingly ambitious, the products of a mature, demanding artistic conscience."
Roth first achieved fame with Goodbye, Columbus (1959). It consisted of a novella and five short stories. Portnoy's Complaint, his third novel, became a number one best seller in 1969 and gained international success. Among his more recent works are Patrimony (1991); Operation Shylock (1993); Sabbath's Theater (1995); American Pastoral (1997); I Married a Communist (1998); and The Human Stain (2000).
"The anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era of the 1950s, the impact of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and the backlash to the excesses of the 1990s enter with all their chaotic power into the lives of Roth's characters," said Miller, "His characters' intense engagement with those unleashed forces of passion and fate that thwart all their efforts at control has re-invigorated the novel and raised Philip Roth to the highest rank of American writers."