Last month, celebrated author Philip Roth quietly announced his retirement to a French magazine and no one in the US noticed until Salon picked up on it today.
In an interview with a French publication called Les Inrocks last month — which does not appear to have been reported in the United States — Roth, 78, said he has not written anything new in the last three years, and that he will not write another novel.
“To tell you the truth, I’m done,” Roth told the magazine, in the most definitive statement he has ever made about his future plans. “‘Nemesis’ will be my last book.”
(via @CharlesCMann)
Author Philip Roth was unable to correct an error on the Wikipedia page for his novel The Human Stain because, while Wikipedia agrees “the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” they “require secondary sources.” To create this secondary source, Roth wrote an open letter explaining the error, and posted it on The New Yorker’s site.
A few hours later, the Wikipedia page for The Human Stain was updated to reflect Roth’s letter.
Roth was motivated in 2012 to explain the inspiration for the book after he noticed an error in the Wikipedia entry on The Human Stain. His efforts to correct the entry were thwarted by Wikipedia editors because he was told he did not have a secondary source for his inspiration. He was responding to claims, given prominence in this entry, by Michiko Kakutani and other critics that the book was inspired by the life of Anatole Broyard, a writer and New York Times literary critic. Roth has repeatedly said these opinions are false. In 2008 Roth explained that he had not learned about Broyard’s ancestry until “months and months after” starting to write the novel.
(via @yappelbaum)
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