Everyman
  • Published: 1 June 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099501466
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $30.00

Everyman

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1 Jul 2010
Paperback
1 Jun 2007
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Reissued in electric new backlist style, Everyman is one of Philip Roth's late masterpieces and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Everyman is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret and stoicism.

The novel takes its title from a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.

The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age when he is stalked with physical woes.

The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
  • Published: 1 June 2007
  • ISBN: 9780099501466
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $30.00
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About the author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.

In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus – a collection of stories, and a novella – for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America’s finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Roth’s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.

portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America
American Pastoral
Nemesis
Exit Ghost
I Married a Communist
Portnoy's Complaint
The Dying Animal
See all

Praise for Everyman

A savage, heart-wrenching novella

Harper's Bazaar

Roth's writing looks uncompromisingly straightforward but is subtle and clever... A human story for our times

New Statesman

Alive with literary brilliance for all its deathly subject matter

Sunday Times

A simple beautiful ending to a deeply sombre book

Scotland on Sunday

The genius of this short, bleak, remarkable novel stems from the way that Roth turns his desolate assessment of death into something bracing: an angry acceptance that mortality is the price we pay for the sheer wonder of this thing called life

The Times

Shimmers with the mysteries and regrets of a whole life...poignant, droll, and eloquent

Daily Telegraph

Every sentence and every paragraph works with the coiled precision of the watch mechanisms that the narrators father repairs and glitters with the lapidary perfection of the perfection he sells

Independent on Sunday

Capable of altering the way you see the world

Observer

So compelling, so important

Guardian

A human story for our times

A.S. Byatt