The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction--a work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art. Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the "girl of my dreams" Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy's Complaint. The book concludes surprisingly--in true Rothian fashion--with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.
- ISBN10 0374152101
- ISBN13 9780374152109
- Publish Date 1 November 1988
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 30 August 2023
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Farrar Straus Giroux
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 328
- Language English