Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Writers Remember Philip Roth: ‘The Planet Weighs So Much Less Without His Words’

Yesterday, at the age of 85, Philip Roth passed away.

Roth was a titan of American letters, but his influence spread past his native shores. His death made headlines across the world, and his obituary appeared on the front page of Le Monde, France’s pre-eminent newspaper. But the most touching tributes to the decorated novelist, who fearlessly chronicled the contradictions and absurdities of Jewish American life, came from those who learned their crafts from him. The Forward is publishing a series of essays on Roth’s impact, with entries from Anne Roiphe, Jennifer Gilmore and more. Read segments of the tributes to Roth from outside our pages, below.

1) Mary Karr

Karr, a poet and memoirist who was friends with Roth, posted a photo of him from last summer — in a hammock, with an iPhone, natch — to Twitter. “From his joyful last summer….the planet weighs so much less without his words exhaled across it,” she wrote.

2) Adam Kirsch

Writing in The Atlantic, Kirsch reflected on Roth’s unique stature within the last century of literature. “We still have writers as talented and accomplished as Roth, but no one seems so grand,” Kirsh wrote. “In mourning him, we are also mourning the fact that literature itself doesn’t matter as much as it once did: It’s hard to imagine any novel, no matter how daring, having the same kind of cultural impact today that ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ had in 1969.”

3) Sloane Crosley

Crosley, writing on Twitter, was one of several authors to honor Roth as she thought he might wish to be honored.

4) Jeet Heer

For The New Republic, Heer dwelled on the remarkably synthetic quality of Roth’s genius.

“What liberated Roth was popular culture. As a boy he had been an avid radio listener and as an adult he got to see the birth of modern stand-up comedy in Chicago, where Nichols and May, along with Lenny Bruce, were inventing a new form of stage humor based on the interplay of voices (cerebral, sex-obsessed, and often inflected with the language of therapy). It was Roth’s genius to realize that the language of stand-up comedy could reinvigorate literary fiction.”

5) Pamela Paul

Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, remembered Roth’s dedicated interest in the literary future. He’d recently contacted her to advocate for coverage of an upcoming book; her followers on Twitter immediately demanded she let us know which book, exactly, it is.

6) Dwight Garner

Garner, a Times book critic, found an apt way to describe the impact of Roth’s death. “One might as well come out and say it: The death of Philip Roth marks, in its way, the end of a cultural era as definitively as the death of Pablo Picasso did in 1973,” he wrote. Garner went on to determine what, exactly, made Roth such an unquestionably decisive force in global culture.

“His work had more rage, more wit, more lust, more talk, more crosscurrents of thought and emotion, more turning over of the universals of existence (in his case, Jewish-American existence), as if tending meat over a fire, than any writer of his time.”

7) Ruth Franklin

Franklin, a book critic for Harper’s and The New Yorker, shared a string of thoughts on Roth’s passing.

8) The New Yorker

The New Yorker published a compendium of both its coverage of Roth and Roth’s appearances in its pages. “His great subjects,” the article’s unnamed authors wrote, “as Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote in this magazine, in 2006, included ‘the Jewish family, sex, American ideals, the betrayal of American ideals, political zealotry, personal identity,” and “the human body (usually male) in its strength, its frailty, and its often ridiculous need.’”

“Just last summer, The New Yorker published Roth’s piece on American identity, and on his love of American place names: ‘The pleasurable sort of sentiment aroused by the mere mention of Spartanburg, Santa Cruz, or the Nantucket Light, as well as unassuming Skunktown Plain, or Lost Mule Flat, or the titillatingly named Little French Lick.’”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.