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Portnoy's Complaint: were you ashamed of it?
Philip Roth
Writer
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Views | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 81. Portnoy's Complaint: were you ashamed of it? | 409 | 01:00 | |
| 82. 'What could outlandishness do for me?' | 267 | 01:44 | |
| 83. The Holocaust | 445 | 02:55 | |
| 84. A man named Gans | 263 | 01:52 | |
| 85. My rejected play about Gans | 258 | 01:58 | |
| 86. Further education: the trial of Ivan the Terrible | 292 | 02:20 | |
| 87. Primo Levi and other survivors | 853 | 03:56 | |
| 88. Hiroshima, and the end of the war | 351 | 03:19 | |
| 89. Vietnam | 342 | 03:43 | |
| 90. The manuscript about the girl who blew up a building | 335 | 02:17 |
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No. I'm not ashamed of it. You know, I'm ashamed of the stories I wrote in college, the proper little stories. You know I'm not ashamed of it, it was a moment in my life and it was a moment in the cultural life of the times, and it came out of that moment. I was in control of it, I made it happen. But it came out of that… even the raucousness with which we would have those dinners – came out of that moment in time. And how old we all were, we were all in our middle thirties back then. And in every instance Jules, Al, Bob, me, [Jules Feiffer, Al Goldman, Bob Brustein], we were all highly responsible citizens. But we weren't responsible when we clowned and performed like this for one another, you know.
The fame of the American writer Philip Roth (1933-2018) rested on the frank explorations of Jewish-American life he portrayed in his novels. There is a strong autobiographical element in much of what he wrote, alongside social commentary and political satire. Despite often polarising critics with his frequently explicit accounts of his male protagonists' sexual doings, Roth received a great many prestigious literary awards which include a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1997, and the 4th Man Booker International Prize in 2011.
Title: "Portnoy's Complaint": were you ashamed of it?
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
Tags: Jules Feiffer, Al Goldman, Bob Brustein
Duration: 1 minute
Date story recorded: March 2011
Date story went live: 18 March 2013
