Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint

David Rampton (University of Ottawa)

Ed. by Christopher Hugh Gair, University of Glasgow
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1969

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Although Philip Roth has arguably been America’s most versatile, ambitious and celebrated novelist since he published

Portnoy’s Complaint

in 1969, it will always be the novel most closely associated with his name, and this for multiple reasons. In it, Roth found a voice that resonated with a new generation and large reading public, the voice of Alexander Portnoy, an intelligent, articulate, self-dramatizing, aggrieved young man, a sex-obsessed, self-confessed “Raskolnikov of jerking off” (

Portnoy

, 18), desperate to tell all about the subject of his life and loves. Roth also found his own voice, or rather another voice, one that enabled him to create a ribald, satiric portrait of a certain type of Jewish upbringing and enlarge the comic possibilities of the American novel. That…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2520 words

Citation: Rampton, David. "Portnoy's Complaint". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 September 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2610, accessed 25 April 2024.]

Save this article