Letting Go

Zusatztext "A first novel of awesome maturity." —James Atlas "A rich book! full of incident! wry and sad and even in its most desolating scene somehow amusing." —Elizabeth Hardwick! Harper's "[Roth] has the finest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis." —Stanley Edgar Hyman Informationen zum Autor PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for  American Pastoral . In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at   the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American   Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction.   He twice won the National Book Award and the National   Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner   Award three times. In 2005  The Plot Against America  received   the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding   historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.”   Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards:   in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities   Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth   recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018. Klappentext Letting Go is Roth's first full-length novel, published just after Goodbye, Columbus, when he was twenty-nine. Set in 1950s Chicago, New York, and Iowa city, Letting Go presents as brilliant a fictional portrait as we have of a mid-century America defined by social and ethical constraints and by moral compulsions conspicuously different from those of today. Newly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, freed from old attachments and hungrily seeking others, Gabe Wallach is drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in literature, and to Libby, Paul's moody, intense wife. Gabe's desire to be connected to the ordered "world of feeling" that he finds in books is first tested vicariously by the anarchy of the Herzes' struggles with responsible adulthood and then by his own eager love affairs. Driven by the desire to live seriously and act generously, Gabe meets an impassable test in the person of Martha Reganhart, a spirited, outspoken, divorced mother of two, a formidable woman who, according to critic James Atlas, is masterfully portrayed with "depth and resonance." The complex liason between Gabe and Martha and Gabe's moral enthusiasm for the trials of others are at the heart of this tragically comic work. Zusammenfassung The first full-length novel from one of the most renowned writers of the twentieth century, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral, tells the story of a mid-century America and offers “further proof of Mr. Roth's astonishing talent…. Letting Go seethes with life” ( The New York Times ). Published when Roth was twenty-nine and set in Chicago, New York, and Iowa city, Letting Go presents as brilliant a fictional portrait as we have of America in the 1950s defined by social and ethical constraints and by moral compulsions conspicuously different from those of today. Newly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, freed from old attachments and hungrily seeking others, Gabe Wallach is drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in literature, and to Libby, Paul's moody, intense wife. Gabe's desire to be connected to the ordered "world of feeling" that he finds in books is first tested vicariously by the anarchy of the Herzes' struggles with responsible adulthood and then by his own eager love affairs. Driven by the desire to live seriously and act generously, Gabe meets an impassable test in the person of Martha Reganhart, a spirited, outspoken, divorced mother of two, a formidable woman who, according to critic James Atlas, is masterfully portrayed with "depth and reson...

Product details

• Authors: Philip Roth
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 02.09.1997
• EAN: 9780679764175
• ISBN: 978-0-679-76417-5
• No. of pages: 640
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 203 mm x 30 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature