Philip Roth, the giant of American literature, has already been the subject of one authorized biography, albeit one mired in controversy – Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey was canceled by W.W. Norton just weeks after its publication and then quickly republished by Skyhorse. That was in 2021, and Steven J. Zipperstein, the Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History in the School of Humanities and Sciences, was already working on another Roth biography and had received encouragement from the man himself, who died in 2018.

Indeed, the author had introduced Zipperstein to some of the important people in his life and provided him with access to his papers. The end result is Philip Roth: Stung by Life (Yale University Press, 2025). Already dubbed “literary biography at its best” by historian Sean Wilentz, it is a full portrait of the man, a remarkable accomplishment given Roth’s own ambivalence toward biographers, as expressed through his characters in books such as Exit Ghost. “Once I was dead, who could protect the story of my life from Richard Kliman?” wonders the protagonist, Roth’s famous alter ego Nathan Zuckerman.

What drew you to Roth initially?

I grew up in a Jewish orthodox milieu, but a very erudite one. My father built a building in the back of our house in Los Angeles that held some 30,000 books. I had access to all the books that I wanted to read with the understanding that I would remain an Orthodox Jew. But I was unable to satisfy the wager. It was reading “Whacking Off,” one of the chapters in Portnoy’s Complaint – the content was self-evident – just before I left for rabbinical school in Chicago at the age of 17 or 18, that left an enormous imprint on me. As I understood it then – and in retrospect, correctly – what Roth was writing about was a character, Alexander Portnoy, who had all the freedom one could ever expect, and yet he was neurotic. What that indicated to me was that while I was eager at that point to leave the world that I was reared in, what was on the other side of the wall was not panacea, was not utopia, and Roth brought that home to me in a way that I never, never forgot. It meant that I would challenge both the dogmatisms that I was raised in and also the dogmatisms that I was entering into. And that helped me, I think, intellectually and eventually as an historian. It helped me certainly as an eventual interpreter of his life.

How did the university support you in writing the book? You mention funding and assistance from Stanford in the acknowledgments. 

I’m someone who is deeply grateful to Stanford, where I’ve loved being since 1991. I had the funding available to suddenly go to Stockholm. I was interviewing Maletta Pfeiffer on the phone, and she was taking material from a box in her living room. I described the interview to my wife, Susan, and she said, “Well, if she has material, why not go there?” I was about to go to Israel to keynote a conference and then just booked a flight to Sweden. I couldn’t have done that without the resources that Stanford provided. And a number of the archival collections are in rather more remote places. I was able to hire someone to review those papers and send them to me.

What was your sense of the man himself from your personal interactions with him? 

When you’re writing a person’s biography, to what extent do you really know the person? In some ways, of course, it’s immensely helpful to have had the kind of conversations I had with him. But how helpful are they? Because, you know, invariably, he’s courting me, and he’s an immensely charming person. So there were the impressions I had in sitting with him, and then I rubbed those impressions against other [people’s] impressions. One of the shortcomings of writing a biography, perhaps especially literary biography, is the way in which some tend to spotlight one person as he or she walks through life. But all of us, even people who are as obsessive a writer as Roth, live in crowded rooms, and I wanted to bring him in contact with other people in my writing.