Award-winning US novelist Philip Roth has died at the age of 85.
The writer, regarded as a leading chronicler of the American experience, produced more than 25 novels including American Pastoral, Sabbath's Theater and The Human Stain, in a career spanning six decades.
He never won the Nobel Prize, but was awarded nearly every other accolade going – including the Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Man Booker prize for international achievement.
The topics he wrote about included the Jewish experience in America, promiscuous male sexuality, and the hypocrisy and disillusionment of American political life since the 1940s.
Portnoy's Complaint, famously considered one of the "dirtiest" books ever published, details the unconventional sexual adventures – including one involving a piece of liver – of a teenager as described to his psychoanalyst.
In The Plot Against America Roth explores a political alternative history – one in which Franklin D Roosevelt is defeated by "America first" candidate Charles Lindbergh in the 1940 US election, resulting in growing antisemitism and the persecution of the author's Jewish-American family.
His work often blurred the lines between lived and imagined experience, with characters sometimes named after the author or those close to him and alter-ego narrators, like Nathan Zuckerman, reappearing across his many novels.
But with women often portrayed as little more than objects amid the lustful agonising of privileged heterosexual men, Roth's work was frequently labelled misogynistic.
As the news of his death spread, commentators shared their loved quotes from the author's work and considered his legacy in American literature.
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“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.” Philip Roth, American Pastoral. Thank you, Goodbye.
— Raj Kamal Jha (@rajkamaljha) 23 May 2018
His literary agent Andrew Wylie confirmed that Mr Roth died of congestive heart failure in a New York hospital on Tuesday night.
The writer officially retired from fiction in 2012, saying "I no longer feel this dedication to write what I have experienced my whole life," and had spent his remaining free time reading, swimming and meeting friends.
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