Philip Roth, a fearless novelist who wrote about Jewish life and male sexual identity, died Tuesday night at a hospital in New York. Roth died in New York City at 10:30 p.m. local time of congestive heart failure, his literary agent Andrew Wylie said. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author was 85. Roth died of congestive heart failure surrounded by close friends and family, his friend Judith Thurman said.
Visitors in his final days came from all walks of life, from writers and lifelong friends to people he helped and inspired along the way.
"He was an incredibly generous person. Always very exigent, and he held you to a very high standard -- and he held himself to an even higher standard," Thurman said. "He was, in my opinion, a very great writer and a very great man."
Roth wrote more than 30 books, including the 1991 memoir "Patrimony," which examined his complex relationship with his father and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for 1997's "American Pastoral," which examined the impact of the 1960s on a New Jersey family.
He was the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, honoured for "Operation Shylock" in 1994, "The Human Stain" in 2001 and "Everyman" in 2007. Roth also received the National Medal of Arts at the White House in 1998.
Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey. The son of an insurance salesman, Roth earned a bachelor's degree at Buckle University and a master's degree in English from the University of Chicago. He dropped out of the doctoral program in 1959 to write film reviews for the New Republic before "Goodbye, Columbus" came out.
Roth taught comparative literature, mostly at the University of Pennsylvania. He retired from teaching in 1992 as a distinguished professor of literature at New York's Hunter College.
