Philip Roth (author) was born on March 19, 1933 in Newark, New Jersey. The second child of second-generation Americans Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the Jewish community of Weequahic, the neighborhood that would be the setting for many of his books. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he went on to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his master’s degree in English literature. Roth was the author of thirty-one books; his first, Goodbye, Columbus – a collection of short stories and a novella published in 1959- received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, earned Roth both critical and commercial success, which cemented his reputation as one of America’s most talented young writers. Roth received the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton and in 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama.  He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Philip Roth died on May 22, 2018 at the age of eighty-five, six years after he stopped writing.