The American author Philip Roth (born 1933) used his Jewish upbringing and his college days for the basis of many of his novels and other works.

Roth used his experiences in growing up in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, and his days as a college student in Rutgers and Bucknell as material for many of his works. He also employed his own writings and the public, and critical reaction to them, as the focus of much of his later material. For example, in two of his novels, Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), Roth expended thousands of words on the question of whether the novel he may be best known for, Portnoy's Complaint (1969), could be considered anti-Semitic.

Roth's critics found elements in his writing that reminded them of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, and Bernard Malamud. He introduced Franz Kafka as a character in his...