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Philip Roth and David Remnick Getting Personal

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The bond between David Remnick and Philip Roth began in the 1990s, built upon Remnick's early reverence for Roth's fiction and their remarkably similar upbringings. Over decades of collaboration, the partnership produced enough published material to fill three-quarters of an issue of *The New Yorker*. Roth frequently capitalized on Remnick's standing invitation, using the magazine's pages for personal interventions such as contesting a Wikipedia entry. Ultimately, the alliance demonstrated the complex intersection of literary fandom and top-tier editorial patronage.

Key points

  • Shared biographical backgrounds as bookish Jewish men raised in New Jersey fostered a uni…: Shared biographical backgrounds as bookish Jewish men raised in New Jersey fostered a uniquely durable rapport between the two figures.
  • The editorial alliance gave Roth an uncontested platform to address public controversies…: The editorial alliance gave Roth an uncontested platform to address public controversies and manage his literary reputation until his death.
  • Their dynamic demonstrated how personal admiration from an editor can grant an elite auth…: Their dynamic demonstrated how personal admiration from an editor can grant an elite author extraordinary institutional influence and access.

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In 2003, Philip Roth turned 70, a strange age for an enfant terrible. To his early admirers, Roth meant chutzpah, rude energy, sly comic mischief. Slowly, improbably, that changed. Roth’s work deepened. Awards piled up. Respectability—the fate of all successful rebels—followed. By 2003, Roth had come full circle: The rebel was revered; the iconoclast, an icon.

And so, celebrations were planned, tributes drafted. Generally, Roth shunned interviews—he preferred silence, exile, and cunning—but this time, he welcomed a BBC camera crew to his spare, wood-paneled studio (“where I really wish I lived,” he once said). As winter light streamed in, he serenely answered questions from a friendly inquisitor: The New Yorker’s David Remnick.

Theirs was a subtle yet strong rapport. Beneath Remnick’s customary poise, his deliberate, thoughtful air, was an intense, fervent devotion. Growing up, he worshipped Roth. He had read Portnoy’s Complaint around twenty times (a novel about compulsion, devoured compulsively). He seldom traveled without packing one of Roth’s novels in his luggage.

When Roth’s biographer, Blake Bailey, was accused of sexual assault, Remnick worried about Roth. Would his prestige…

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