The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

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<b>The Facts</b> is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction—a work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art. <br><br>Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the "girl of my dreams" Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by <b>Goodbye, Columbus</b>; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write <b>Portnoy's Complaint</b>. <br><br>The book concludes surprisingly—in true Rothian fashion—with a sustained assault by the novelist <i>against</i> his proficiencies as an autobiographer.