...I finally went back to my seat in the second row and sat there doing what I've done throughout my professional life: I tried to think, first, how to make credible a somewhat extreme, if not outright ridiculous story, and, next, how, after telling it, to fortify and defend myself from the affronted who read into the story an intention having perhaps to do less with the author's perversity than with their own.

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.