“Writing turns you into someone who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right is the perversity that draws you on.”

— Philip Roth, American Pastoral

In 2016, Roth donated 3,500 of his books to his hometown library in Newark, his ‘other home.’ Among those were the fifteen books Roth said influenced his life the most.

• Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast, first read at age 14
• Finnley Wren by Philip Wylie, first read at age 16
• Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, first read at age 17
• Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, first read at age 20
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, first read at age 21
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, first read at age 23
• The Assistant by Bernard Malamud, first read at age 24
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, first read at age 25
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, first read at age 25
• The Trial by Franz Kafka, first read at age 27
• The Fall by Albert Camus, first read at age 30
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, first read at age 35
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, first read at age 37
• Cheri by Colette, first read at age 40
• Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, first read at age 41