Philip Roth dead! Hard to believe. He ever seemed like the spirit of youth itself even as he grew old and frail. I first learned of him when I was a student at Yale Law School. If memory serves, my ultra-genius classmate and friend, Duncan Kennedy, told me about "Portnoy’s Complaint." It was a screamingly funny and astute commentary on life in the late 1960s in New York among young and hip Jews.
It appeared in installments in the Paris Review and in other magazines. I did not get the Paris Review, but they got it at the Sterling Library at Yale. I well remember reading it in the fluorescently lit ornate main reading room and laughing so hard the librarians had to tell me to shut up or leave.
It was witty. Bawdy. Incredibly well written with the touches of wordsmith genius that were to be Roth’s hallmarks all of his life, so writes Ben Stein in The American Specator. To read more, click here.
Ben Stein is a writer, an actor, and a lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read more more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.
© 2022 Newsmax. All rights reserved.