With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.

To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration focus devotion to the reading. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral which featured one of his best-known characters Nathan Zuckerman the subject of many other of Roth's novels.

writers of his generation: his books have twice received the National Book Award twice the National Book Critics Circle award and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. The Human Stain (2000) another Zuckerman novel was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. S.