My Life as a Man

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Philip Roth's 1974 novel about Peter Tarnopol, a young novelist whose disastrous marriage to a manipulative woman named Maureen has wrecked his life and his writing. The book opens with two stories Tarnopol has written about his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, and then turns to his own account of the marriage, his affairs, his psychoanalysis and his struggle to tell the truth.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”