by Philip Roth · 1988
Philip Roth frames his own memoir as a letter to his fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, tracing his Newark boyhood, his father's near-fatal 1944 surgery, his years at Bucknell and Chicago, his troubled first marriage to Josie, and the furor over his early Jewish-themed stories, then closes with a fictional Zuckerman letter that skeptically dissects the manuscript and urges Roth not to publish it.