Portnoy’s Complaint.

ROTH, Philip.

Item Number: 87543

New York: Random House, 1969.

First edition of Roth’s breakthrough novel. Octavo, original blue cloth, red topstain. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Jan 1977 To Marlene Walach- Philip Roth.” Some browning to a few pages in the rear, near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.

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).