Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said...no, I'd be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar's a roar and no one is hard put to miss its meaning.

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.