**The unconventional autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize–winnning, bestselling author—the most vigorous and truthful of American writers ( *Newsday* )—who reshaped our idea of fiction. A work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art. ** Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the girl of my dreams Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by *Goodbye, Columbus;* and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write *Portnoy’s Complaint.* The book concludes surprisingly—in true Rothian fashion—with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.