Philip Roth was born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey, into a lower-middle-class Jewish family. He attended Rutgers University in Newark from 1950 to 1951, then transferred to Bucknell University, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laud, with a major in English, in 1954. Roth earned a Master of Arts from the University of Chicago in 1955, and from 1955 to 1956 he served in the U.S. Army, from which he was honorably discharged due to a back injury. He briefly enrolled in a Ph.D. program in English at the University of Chicago, but left in 1957 to pursue a career in writing. Roth has worked as an instructor at University of Chicago (1956-1958), University of Iowa (1960-1962), State University of New York at Stony Brook (1967-1968), and Hunter City College University of New York (1989-1992). He was writer-in-residence at Princeton University from 1962 to 1964 and at University...