Remembering Roth

To most audiences, Philip Roth is a literary icon, author of probing, provocative works like American Pastoral, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Goodbye, Columbus. But to James Atlas, Philip Roth was more than just a writer—he was a friend. In 1977, when he was 28, James Atlas published his first book, a biography of the poet Delmore Schwartz, and was stunned to receive a congratulatory letter from Philip Roth. He had been moved by the tragic story it told. Thus began a friendship that lasted, with a few intervals, until Roth's death. Roth was living in rural Connecticut then, having exiled himself from the literary noise of Manhattan in order to focus on his work, and was on his own. He invited Atlas to come visit, which he did—the first of numerous pilgrimages to the Roth homestead. They remained close for nearly two decades, reading each other’s work, wandering the streets of the West Side—Roth had an apartment on Atlas’s block—and commiserating about the solitary rigors of the writer’s lif