Portnoy’s Complaint.

First Edition of Portnoy's Complaint; Inscribed by Philip Roth to photographer and Friend Naomi Savage

Portnoy’s Complaint.

ROTH, Philip.

Item Number: 5560

New York: Random House, 1969.

First edition. Octavo, original blue cloth, red topstain. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper in the year of publication, “To Naomi + David Fondly, Philip Jan 1969.” The recipient was artist and photographer Naomi Savage, close friend of the author. She photographed Roth on several occasions and those images were used on several books. Small blemish to the topstain, near fine in near fine dust jacket with a few small closed tears. A nice association.

Along with Saul Bellow's Herzog, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint defined Jewish American literature in the 1960s. Roth's masterpiece takes place on the couch of a psychoanalyst, an appropriate jumping-off place for an insanely comical novel about the Jewish American experience. Roth has written several great books--Goodbye, Columbus and When She Was Good among them, but it is perhaps Portnoy's Complaint for which he is best known. "Philip Roth has the fineset eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis" (Stanley Edgar Hyman).

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