5/30/2023 0 Comments Portnoy's complaint first edition![]() ![]() Roth’s 1974 essay “Imagining Jews” (included in the Library of America Roth volume Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013), remains the essential post-mortem on the Portnoy affair, and an eloquent defense of artistic freedom. (The book’s minimalist dust jacket, by Paul Bacon, became something of an icon in its own right, and set the template for all of Roth’s subsequent releases over most of the next decade.) The book’s frank treatment of one American Jewish male’s sexual neuroses and its wild, frequently self-lacerating humor made it a cultural phenomenon that resulted in instant best seller status and, for Roth, a disorienting new level of literary celebrity. The work in question was Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s third novel, which he set loose on an unsuspecting world exactly fifty years ago this month. ![]() The New Yorker called it “one of the dirtiest books ever published.” For the Los Angeles Times, it was “the sickest book of the decade.” ![]() (Bob Peterson/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) ![]() Revisiting Portnoy’s complaints, 50 years later, with Bernard Avishai L: First edition of Portnoy’s Complaint (Random House, 1969). ![]()
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