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I wanted to be an American
Philip Roth
Writer
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Views | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 111. Being a Jew in America | 317 | 02:53 | |
| 112. I was one Jew when I was 10, another when I was 20 | 249 | 01:40 | |
| 113. What it is to be a Jew shifts with where you are | 283 | 02:11 | |
| 114. I wanted to be an American | 262 | 01:13 | |
| 115. Searching for my burial plot leads me to write Sabbath's... | 453 | 04:30 | |
| 116. Mickey Sabbath | 569 | 02:39 | |
| 117. Sabbath's Theater: a highly comic book about death and... | 525 | 01:10 | |
| 118. Living with the character you invent | 400 | 02:01 | |
| 119. Inventing a woman | 385 | 02:28 | |
| 120. Sex in literature | 492 | 02:20 |
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Jews were the Americans I knew best. Mississippians were the Americans [William] Faulkner knew best. Middle... Mid-westerners... Michiganders were the Americans that [Ernest] Hemingway knew best. The... the Jews were the Americans I knew best. But I never felt for a second – despite the fact that I knew there were enemies out there, real enemies and... and in America – I never felt for a second that I wasn't an American. That was always, I think, the... the powerful, the... maybe my strongest identity, my most powerful identity, and I wanted to be an American. That's why I read all those books. That's why I read all those... all that American literature. And I wasn't trying to graft myself onto the tree, I was trying to find out what the tree was like in all its branches.
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: I wanted to be an American
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: USA, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway
Duration: 1 minute, 13 seconds
Date story recorded: March 2011
Date story went live: 18 March 2013
