Down The Shore

Philip Roth and his brother Sandy at Bradley Beach, 1942.

The freedom and seaside downtime Philip Roth describes in his family’s vacations can stir up very similar feelings of summer days in one’s own childhood.

With one exception-- a big one. Roth writes of one vacation in the early 1940s when gangs of boys “swarmed out of Neptune, a ramshackle little town on the Jersey shore and stampeded along the boardwalk into Bradley Beach, hollering ‘Kikes! Dirty Jews!’ And beating up whoever hadn’t run for cover.”

Roth says Bradley Beach just south of Asbury Park “was the very modest little vacation resort where we and hundreds of other lower-middle-class Jews from humid, mosquito-ridden north Jersey cities rented rooms or shared small bungalows for several weeks during the summer. It was paradise for me, even though we lived three in a room, and four when my father drove down the old Cheesequake highway to see us on weekends or to stay for his two-week vacation.”

“Though the riots occurred just twice, for much of one July and August it was deemed unwise for a Jewish child to venture out after supper alone, or even with friends, though nighttime freedom in shorts and sandals was one of Bradley’s greatest pleasures for a ten-year-old on vacation from homework and the school year’s bedtime hours.

After relating a story that had spread among kids of one child’s face badly hurt from being pulled back and forth across the boardwalk planks,  Roth says that story “impressed upon me how barbaric was this irrational hatred of families who, as anyone could see, were simply finding in Bradley Beach a little inexpensive relief from the city heat, people just trying to have a quiet good time, bothering no one, except occasionally each other, as when one of the women purportedly expropriated from the icebox, for her family’s corn on the cob, somebody else’s quarter of a pound of salt butter. If that was as much harm as any of us could do, why make a bloody pulp of a Jewish child’s face?”

References:

Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. (New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).

Fiction

As we listen to recordings of Roth’s master classes and other interviews, we’ve been compiling a list of fiction Roth enjoyed and praised. Roth also taught literature, we know he read much Celine, James, Mishima, Bellow, Flaubert, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Colette, Tolstoy, Camus, Faulkner, and many, many more.

We know which books Roth found influential during the first half of his life, because he identified them. What about the period after that? We have some clues from interviews, but overall, it’s very difficult to distinguish which books from his collection of over 7,000 Roth enjoyed most.

Several times, Roth brought up Don DeLillo’s Libra, which he considered a “first-rate” novel, a book about Lee Harvey Oswald’s life and the assassination of President Kennedy. Roth also complimented Douglas Hobbie’s Boomfell, a “witty and skillful” book and he also loved Denis Johnson’s Angels. Roth also talked about Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, often.

Some other titles Roth enjoyed include: Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, LeCarre’s A Perfect Spy, James’ The Ambassadors, Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, Weil’s Life With a Star, and Ames’ I Pass Like the Night.

“I read the writers I read thirty, forty, fifty years ago, who I want to read now as an old man. I want to read now in a way, fresh. Turgenev, I had a good time with, Conrad I had a good time with, Hemingway and Faulkner I had a good time with. Oh my goodness  I read Kafka like crazy, I think I saturated myself with Kafka. A way of telling a story that no one had ever come upon before. The invention of a world that no one had invented before. It's astonishing. So I want to read these books before I die, again.”-Philip Roth [1]

In later years, Roth focused on reading nonfiction, specifically American history.

References:

1. William Karel and Livia Manera, Philip Roth Unmasked, (film), 2013.

Nothing Doing

Go down that road, turn a corner, and if it’s a good day, you may come upon a Philip Roth follower and learn how one of America’s greatest novelists inspires readers to keep going and not give up.

Monday, May 22, will be five years since Roth died from congestive heart failure in 2018. He was 85 and left in his words and imagination, his deepness and humor, what he wanted us to know about his lifetime and learning, his family and Newark.

Just one of Roth’s strengths and part of his bountiful legacy was his determination to keep writing through the challenges of longtime diagnosed coronary artery disease and even longer debilitating back pain from an Army accident. One of numerous – and humorous -- passages of not giving up comes in Patrimony, a memoir of his close relationship with his father, Herman, in their last years together before Herman’s own death at the age of 88 from a brain tumor in late October 1989.

Roth and his father are with the neurosurgeon Vallo Benjamin in Manhattan and the doctor is describing the process of undertaking a biopsy for Herman’s tumor. Philip moves from the reality of his dad first asking the doctor for a couple more years to live and then three to four more years to the following imagined plea:

“I raised myself up out of the immigrant streets without even a high school education, I never knuckled under, never broke the law, never lost my courage or said ‘I quit.’ I was a faithful husband, a loyal American, a proud Jew, I gave two wonderful boys every opportunity I myself never had, and what I am demanding is only what I deserve – another eighty-six years! Why,” he would ask him “should a man die at all?” And of course, he would have been right to ask. It’s a good question.

Going Fishing

Newark’s Weequahic Park, even when not mentioned, seems to be standing by if needed in the stories Philip Roth created about the people and city he loved.

In his final novel Nemesis, the story of a fictionalized and deadly polio outbreak in the summer of 1944, Roth evokes a touching memory during a sad funeral procession of 12-year old friends meeting up along Chancellor Avenue and “walking all the way up and all the way down the hill to Weequahic Park to go fishing and ice-skating and rowing on the lake.”

“Olmsted’s vast and beautiful Weequahic Park, our wooded, hilly countryside, our skating pond, our fishing hole, our necking parlor, our pick-up place, where Portnoy’s uncle Hymie parked his car to pay cold cash to the Polish janitor’s shiksa daughter Alice to stay away from his son Heshie.” [1]

A recent visit to the large 311- acre park and its 80- acre lake told its own story of continuity as Weequahic Park presents both the natural beauty of its 1901 Olmsted Brothers design and recreational opportunities in 2023 for people of all ages. The 2.2 mile Weequahic Lake Trail appeared noticeably popular on a Saturday morning. And although true that people still ask if there are horses at the park, the well-known horse racing of many years ended in 1961. What the Essex County park offers now, according to county literature, are tennis and basketball courts, baseball fields and playgrounds, festival and concert sites.   The park also includes the 18-hole Weequahic Golf Course, the oldest public course in New Jersey.

Not to forget fishing.  Coming up soon during the county’s 2023 Fishing Derby Week will be Weequahic Lake’s turn for all young people 15 and under, from 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 23. Registration begins at 5 p.m. Derby fishing at 6 p.m. and awards at 7:15. See www.essexcountynj.org for any cancellations due to weather.

References:

Philip Roth at 80 (New York: Library of America, 2014), 54.

William Styron

Styron’s inscription to Roth in This Quiet Dust: And Other Writings; Styron at Philip Roth’s 60th birthday party in CT.

Visitors often inquire about works by other authors in the collection, especially novels by Saul Bellow, John Updike, and William Styron. Of course, Philip Roth was well acquainted with many writers. Roth happened to meet Styron when he was in Rome in 1959 and they became good friends. Later in life, Roth purchased a home in Connecticut near Styron in Litchfield County.

Styron inscribed a few of his books to Roth, including This Quiet Dust: And Other Writings, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and In the Clap Shack. Additionally, correspondence from Styron to Roth has been published in The Selected Letters of William Styron (Random House: 2012) in which Styron provides feedback on Our Gang, The Great American Novel, and Operation Shylock. On January 23, 1979, Styron concluded one letter with “However, we can get our walking sticks out when you come back in the spring and hobble through the Connecticut woods, in the late summer of life for you, I in the early autumn. [1]

Styron passed away from pneumonia in 2006.

References:

1. Rose Styron, ed. The Selected Letters of William Styron. New York: Random House, 2012.

Come See Us

Very often on any given day, it is the visitors to the Philip Roth Personal Library who remind us of why we are here. Tuesday morning of last week was no different.

The first to show up were Roth enthusiasts Kate from London and Davide from New York City. Kate works in the book industry and was visiting her good friend and work colleague who now lives in New York. With their deep reading and knowledge about Roth, Kate and Davide chose to connect with the novelist on their own, looking at each of the exhibits of his life and work, sometimes sharing their thoughts with each other, very similar to visiting an art gallery or museum or reading a Roth novel. There was a nice moment when at least two people in the room said Roth’s The Human Stain, was one’s favorite.

Then as Kate and Davide left to return to New York, Maria and Federico arrived, having just come on the train from Philadelphia where Maria is on a work assignment as an interpreter. The couple’s longtime hometown is Juarez, Mexico. As Maria started looking at the exhibits and books, Federico seemed to be on a different track and spoke of the excitement and wonder of photographing the 2004  Seattle Central Library with its modern glass and steel architecture featuring floating platforms and a block design. In a similar vein, he and Maria were drawn to Newark Public Library’s 1901 Beaux Art building, he said.

Now Federico was sitting down at the Roth table in the Reading Room and talked about the architecture of cathedrals in New York City and then in different countries in the world. Our discussion was taking on the feeling of a pilgrimage and, in fact, we now were at the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in the Galicia community in Spain. Then, we were in Juarez, Mexico and Federico was describing how hard it was to have actor Steve McQueen die in their town after a cancer surgery at a clinic when he was 50. Somewhere in that discussion we spoke of the 1942 movie Casablanca giving acting roles to refugees who had escaped from the Nazis and come to America. Maria, in the meantime, was staying on course and now came to sit with us at the table reading our Philip Roth Personal Library catalogue that came out last year.

It was time to leave and Federico and Maria were heading over to Halsey Street to get some lunch and back on a train to Philadelphia. Perhaps on their next visit,  they would see Newark’s own Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart. As they went out, Federico stopped in the second floor hallway to take some interior shots highlighting the architecture and design of our Newark Public Library.

A Life of Writing

Roth’s writing was prolific. It went well beyond his novels, Roth was constantly reading and taking notes, or writing down quotes he heard, or ideas. We have boxes and boxes of the loose notes and sticky notes we discovered in the books he read. Some even consisted of entire notepads. In Roth’s writing studio in Connecticut, random folders and marbled composition books were found on shelves and on desks. The image above captures a page from a composition book that appeared unused, however we found writing on three of the pages.

“Walking all the time, dragging his

feet across the pavement all day long

wearing out his heels + soles

wearing out his shoes”

Most of the time, the writing consists of observations or detailed notes about a book Roth was reading. In some instances, they might be doodles, phone numbers, or errands. We also found Roth recording his blood pressure throughout the day. And sometimes, we aren’t certain whether Roth is writing down something he heard or an idea he wished to develop. Occasionally, the author would make a note, and then wrote in capital letters, “EXPLORE THIS.”

The Canary Funeral in Newark, NJ

Last week we revealed on our social media accounts that the story of the canary funeral as described in Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist was based on an actual event that occurred in 1920.

Emilio Russomanno, a cobbler who operated a shop on Boyden Street, owned a beloved canary, Jimmie. The bird died after choking on a watermelon seed which had been accidentally mixed into its food. Russomanno was distraught. He proceeded to make funeral arrangements, which involved hiring a 15-piece brass band, a hearse, two coaches, and four pallbearers. Neighbors donated funds towards the occasion, which cost $400. Hundreds attended the funeral on August 4, 1920 and thousands more observed from their residences. Russomanno wept while attendees tried to restrain from laughing. [1] The procession terminated near Branch Brook Park where Jimmie was buried. The headstone, a cross, contained a canary in the center. The burial occurred in a vacant lot on Factory Street (current-day 8th Avenue) near the Colonnade Apartments.

While teaching a class at Bard College, Philip Roth shared that this scene was the most thrilling and satisfying one to write. When he was a boy, Roth remembered hearing his father, Herman, talk about the event. “And so I wanted to tell the story of the canary funeral for the sheer pleasure of telling it”and “if you wanted to go further with it, and I don't in the book, and you don't have to, but now that we're talking about it, it's some strong profound identification with the weak thing, with the canary.”[2]

References:

1. Michael Immerso, Newark’s Little Italy: The Vanished First Ward (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

2. Philip Roth, remarks made while visiting Norman Manea’s Contemporary Masters literature seminar at Bard College, November 11, 1999.

The Human Stain

We have just a few transcriptions left to finish. Most of these, as we’ve mentioned previously, consist of interviews or recordings of classes on audio cassette tapes. One of these, two tapes labeled “Bard, A.P., 1999” were supposed to be recordings of Roth visiting Norman Manea’s class at Bard College. Roth spoke on several of his books during the sessions. So we’ve gone through side A & B of Tape 1, the audio quality is poor, we suppose Roth sat closest to the tape recorder so most of his voice is clear, although the same cannot be said for Manea or the students who ask questions.

This week, we began listening to Tape 2. Confusion ensued. Side A begins with Roth calling a colleague about The Human Stain. The recording stops. Then a segment of the class at Bard plays. After a few minutes, it cuts off and the rest of the tape contains recordings of phone conversations. First, Roth calls “Bob.” Roth and Bob discuss the author’s use of some French phrases, leading us to believe it’s Robert Lowenstein, Roth’s mentor and teacher from Weequahic High School. Bob poses some interesting questions about the draft of the novel, to which Roth replies that he stretched the truth and that Bob should just keep his mouth shut. Bob raises a few more points, Roth responds, and then Bob says, “Oh, you got an answer for everything!” Towards the end of the conversation, Roth invites his friend to a ceremony at the French Embassy (Roth was to receive the French Order of Arts and Letters).

Next conversation. It’s the remainder of Side 1, Roth calling a man named Bernie, inquiring whether Bernie had the chance to read about “the history of dry cleaning in North America.” LOL! Is it Bernard Swerdlow? We’re not sure, perhaps we’ll get additional clues as we listen to Side 2. Bernie offers much feedback, going page by page. As the recording goes on, Roth begins to disagree with some of the suggestions, then expresses that Bernie simply doesn’t understand some of it. For example, Bernie gets stuck on Roth’s description of Coleman and Coleman’s use of Viagra. We look forward to hearing the rest of it!

That Eames Chair

Philip Roth found the Herman Miller Eames chair to be extremely comfortable. Roth suffered back pain most of his life due to an injury he sustained while in the Army when training at Fort Dix. At the time of his death in 2018, Roth owned three Eames chairs, one in his apartment in New York City, and two at his estate in Connecticut.

We often get asked which chair is displayed in the Philip Roth Reading Room. It is from Roth’s writing studio in Connecticut, please refer to the image above.

If you take a look at the cover of Ira Nadel’s biography, Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Roth is depicted seated in an Eames chair. That photo was taken in Roth’s apartment in New York City and that chair was bequeathed to his official biographer, Blake Bailey.

Now, there were two black leather Eames chairs in Connecticut, one in the writing studio and one in Roth’s parlor. Where is the second? It does not seem that it was part of the estate auction, which included a brown leather chair “in the style of Herman Miller.” Perhaps it may have been bequeathed to one of Roth’s acquaintances?

Roth Unbound

The Roth Festival brought in an incredible amount of visitors into the Philip Roth Personal Library! Saturday, March 18, 2023, was by far the busiest and some of our scholars and fans were interviewed by the media. Here is a sampling of some of the great coverage both the Philip Roth Personal Library and the festival received. We met many of these local, national, and international reporters and it was a pleasure telling them about the collection:

Mark J. Bonamo, “Roth Fans In Newark Celebrate Literary Giant's Legacy and Relevancy,” TAPinto Newark, March 23, 2023.

Sean Thor Conroe, “Going Roth Mode,” The Paris Review, April 19, 2023.

Karen Heller, “The Late, Contentious Philip Roth Is Embraced by his Hometown on his 90th,” Washington Post, March 22, 2023.

Felipe Franco Munhoz, “Philip Roth: Autor é Celebrado com Conferência, Passeio de ônibus e Biblioteca em seus 90 Anos,” O Estado de S. Paulo, March 19, 2023.

James C. Taylor, “At Philip Roth Festival, N.J. Author’s Complicated Legacy Is Met with Celebration and Criticism.” NJ.com, March 20, 2023.

Roth@90

During the last 3 days, March 15 - 17, 2023, The Newark Public Library hosted the Philip Roth Society’s conference, Roth@90. Sessions were held in two of the Newark Public Library’s meeting rooms and between sessions, members came to visit the Philip Roth Personal Library. We learned about interesting research pursuits and why members study Roth’s oeuvre.

During the conference, various topics were discussed by numerous scholars. We had the pleasure of sitting in on a few of the panels: “Discovering Roth at the Newark Public Library,” “On Writing Philip Roth’s biography,” and “Newark.” Other sessions included “New Voices on The Ghost Writer,” “Roth International,” “Roth (Un)Canceled,” “Roth and Identity,” and “Roth: Body and Soul.”

The Philip Roth Society was last in Newark to celebrate Roth’s 80th birthday in 2013. Sessions were held at the Robert Treat Hotel and attendees came to the library to view the exhibit, “Philip Roth: Photos From a Lifetime.” So many members who are here this week were also visited the library ten years ago. It was great to see everyone back in the library!

Roth Remembered

Norman Manea, dressed as General Béla Király, and his wife Cella, n.d.

As festivities draw near for Philip Roth’s 90th birthday, one can’t help being drawn once again to the deeply touching remembrance of Roth by his friend Norman Manea in our Philip Roth Personal Library catalogue.

The Romanian novelist and writer-in-residence at Bard College was one of many Eastern European writers Roth worked with to help get their work published in the United States. In Manea’s case, an unbreakable friendship evolved from their first in-person meeting two years after his forced exile in 1986 as Roth went on to help Manea secure a teaching position at Bard and to publish his novels.

Manea speaks of Roth deciding before his death to ask the Bard College President to give him a place in the college cemetery next to Manea “in order not to be bored in the endless afterlife.” Roth died on May 22, 2018.

“At his burial at the Bard cemetery, next to his and my future grave,” Manea writes, “I read in front of the small saddened audience a page from The Dying Animal, his book dedicated to me. After a longer pause, I looked again and again to the place where he is waiting for me.”

In a June 23, 2018 article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Manea spoke of his last visit with his wife Cella to be with Roth in the hospital and said theirs was a friendship that “deepened with time. Each of us marked the life events of the other, and we always celebrated New Year’s Eve together, in our home.”  Roth was their American brother for 30 years, Manea says, offering the following tribute to a legacy amid devasting loss:
 

“Philip Roth, the great writer, an acute observer of human existence, with all its cruel and burlesque conflicts and contradictions, has left us to face without him our explosive present and uncertain future. His forceful intelligence, his lucid and interrogative conscience, his unshaken devotion to the written page will not be forgotten; all the libraries of our tormented world will remind us of him in our fight for truth and beauty, for ardor and authenticity. “

References:

A Closer Connection As Among Close Relatives, by Norman Manea, Philip Roth Personal Library Catalogue, The Newark Public Library, 2022.

Norman Manea, “Nearby and Together: Norman Manea on His Friend Philip Roth,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 23, 2018.

Coleman and his Mom

One of many heart rending scenes Philip Roth created for his readers comes fairly soon in The Human Stain when Coleman Silk, an African American college student and future college professor tells his mom at her home in East Orange that he’s made the decision amid cruel bigotry that he will now identify as Jewish and white because he can. He has told a white woman he loves and is soon to marry that his parents are dead and he has no siblings. Mrs. Silk is a nurse in a Newark hospital. Coleman’s dad, an optician who worked as a waiter on a train after the Depression closed the banks, has just died.

Many of you know what follows. Others have not had the chance to read it. But the suffering and anguish Roth makes us feel for this mother as she questions her son is hard to lighten, hard to forget.

“And she believes your parents are dead, Coleman. That’s what you told her.”

“That’s right.”

“You have no brother, you have no sister. There is no Ernestine. There is no Walt.”

“I’m never going to know my grandchildren,” Gladys continues, and suggests a future where Coleman will arrange for her to be sitting somewhere, in a railroad station, the zoo, Central Park, and he’ll parade the children by as a birthday present to her. She says she would let him do that.

 “You tell me the only way I can ever touch my grandchildren is for you to hire me to come over as Mrs. Brown to babysit and put them to bed. I’ll do it. Tell me to come over as Mrs. Brown and clean your house. I’ll do that. Sure I’ll do what you tell me. I have no choice.”

Coleman says she can disown him; he has just disowned her. Later that night, his brother calls and warns him to never try to see their mother again.

“No contact. No calls. Nothing. Never. Hear me?”

Storytelling

Previously, we’ve shared information about the youth writing contest hosted by the Newark Public Library and the NJ Performing Arts Center, but now we would like to provide you with an exciting update. We received nearly 200 submissions and two rounds of judging have been completed. The winners have been chosen and the two first place winners (Grades 9-10 and Grades 11-12) will read their submissions during the Philip Roth Festival!

The program, My Newark, begins at 9pm on March 17th at the NJ Performing Arts Center. We hope that you’ll be able to attend to hear our winners, Naomi and Olamide, read their incredible Newark stories. Additional participants include playwrights Chisa Hutchinson, Richard Wesley, poets Jasmine Mans and Dimitri Reyes and author Mikki Taylor. Tickets are only $10.

Congratulations to all of our winners!

“McDonald’s America”

In a series of recorded conversations between Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, the two authors discuss a variety topics: literature (obviously), acquaintances, and views of America, including Heidegger’s. At one point Roth began to express vexation about narrow viewpoints: that American films are not limited to Robert Redford films, American music encompasses much more than jazz or West Side story, and American literature is superb:

The greatest literature in the world for the last century, take it over a century, has been American literature. All the power, and innovation, and strength has been here in America. There are 20 writers, who as a group, make a very free, powerful football team. And there's no country in the world that can give you the names of 20 very solid writers. So why won't you admit this into your sense of America? The music, these documentary filmmakers, myself telling, the novelists have really dominated the world's imagination. For over this course of the whole century, there have been decades and periods and great individual writers from other countries. But none of this can get through this stupid bs, not McDonald's America. -Philip Roth [1]

References:

Roth, Philip. Interview with Saul Bellow. December 4, 1999. Audiocassette, Philip Roth Personal Library.

Researching the flu and polio epidemics

Philip Roth’s personal library contained a very large books about polio and summer camp. Camping traditions, summer camp sports, Native American lore, and much more. Upon finding these books, we were amazed by Roth’s thorough research process, but it turns out that what we discovered at the time was only a portion of the material the author consulted.

Just this week we picked up a donation related to Nemesis. Hundreds and hundreds of clippings from the Newark News from 1916, as well as letters Roth sent to a Newark librarian about his research for Nemesis. In one letter, Roth recalled a boycott when he was attending Chancellor Avenue School that took place on October 29, 1945. In another, pictured above, Roth offers gratitude for research assistance.

Also touching is Roth’s appreciation and acknowledgement. The collection contains several thank you notes. Each time Roth received a packet of newspaper clippings, he always remembered to express his gratitude.

Awards, diplomas, and more

This week, a visitor asked whether Philip Roth displayed his many honors. Quite a few, yes. Items that could be hung, such as diplomas and some awards were framed and arranged on walls on the second floor of the author’s home in Connecticut. These included: National Book Critics Circle awards, the National Jewish Book Council award, PEN/Faulkner, PEN/Nabokov, and PEN/Bellow awards, honorary doctorates, his diplomas from Bucknell and the University of Chicago, and a few promotional posters related to his novels.

These recognitions are now housed in the Philip Roth Personal Library. A few are on display—some awards, including the Grinzane Award and others are displayed as part of the inaugural exhibition and Roth’s diploma from Bucknell is exhibited on a shelf in the reading room. A list of all the honors bestowed upon Roth are listed in the gallery.

Marking our calendars for March!

Philip Roth would have turned 90 on March 19, 2023. You bet we’ll be celebrating and paying a tribute to the author.

Save the dates:

• March 15 - 17, 2023: Roth@90, Philip Roth Society Conference at the Newark Public Library

  This year's theme is "Roth@90," and will feature a host of Roth-focused scholarly papers and creative pursuits. Our Thursday keynote will feature Alexandra Marshall, Elisa Albert, and Joshua Cohen. More Information.

• March 17 - 19, 2023 Philip Roth Unbound: Illuminating a Literary Legacy

  Hosted by the NJ Performing Arts Center, a weekend-long festival that will celebrate, challenge and explore the life, legacy and work of novelist and Newark-native Philip Roth. Featuring star-studded readings, conversations, comedy, controversy and debate with over forty of the most prominent writers, actors, journalists, artists and public intellectuals working today. Tickets on sale now! More Information.

Looking back on 2022

There is a misconception that people who work in libraries read books all day while they’re on the job. For example, we’ve been asked if we’ve read all of Philip Roth’s notes in his collection of thousands of books. The answer would be no. We’ve been preoccupied with assorted projects.

Looking back on 2022, we’ve accomplished a great deal:

• created and published a catalogue of the collection

• launched a poetry club, Poetry for the Public, and hosted workshops and very well-attended open mic events

• transcribed many audio interviews (lots more remain)

• hosted tours and class visits

• initiated a writing contest for high school-age youth (176 submissions are currently being judged)

• started a book club

• offered writing workshops

• commenced an awesome newsletter

• welcomed and assisted researchers from around the world

• rechecked the entire collection a third time to ensure we didn’t overlook any ephemera or markings

• contributed an essay for The Bloomsbury Handbook to Philip Roth (forthcoming)

• wrote an essay for a special issue of Philip Roth Studies (forthcoming)

Thank you for supporting the Philip Roth Personal Library. Here’s to continued endeavors in 2023! 🍾