"You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more." -- Philip Roth (3-19-1933 - 5-22-2018), prolific novelist and one of the most important American novelists of the 20th century, in "The Dying Animal," 2001. The author of "Goodbye, Columbus," "Portnoy's Complaint," "The Human Stain," and "Sabbath's Theater," Roth won every major literary award, save the Nobel Prize: two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the National Humanities Medal (2011) among other honors.
The New York Times obituary said of Roth:
"Mr. Roth was the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers — Saul Bellow and John Updike were the others — who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century. Outliving both and borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind, Mr. Roth wrote more novels than either of them. In 2005 he became only the third living writer (after Bellow and Eudora Welty) to have his books enshrined in the Library of America.
'Updike and Bellow hold their flashlights out into the world, reveal the world as it is now,' Mr. Roth once said. 'I dig a hole and shine my flashlight into the hole.'”
(photo: Julian Hibbard / Getty Images)
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