After The Human Stain, Roth sprinted to his career’s finish line with a remarkable decade-long kick. In short, he wrote seven more books.

His topics were often autobiographical, yet so tantalisingly veiled that Roth appeared in several novels.  His second wife, the English-born actress Claire Bloom, felt betrayed when she read a manuscript of Deception: A Novel (1990), a brutally frank anatomy of infidelity that featured characters named Philip and Claire. Roth removed Bloom’s name before publishing, but included an afterword with the figures arguing.

Roth’s 1987 memoir, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, was framed by his correspondence with one of his frequent fictional alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman. The author asked his creation for feedback.

“Don’t publish,” Zuckerman replied at the end of the memoir, delivering a harsh critique of the “real” Roth for all his blind spots and willful omissions.

Zuckerman, like Roth a Jewish writer assaulted by Jewish critics at the outset of his career, was one of several figures Roth returned to repeatedly in his fiction. The character was central in The Ghost Writer — the 1979 novel in which Zuckerman imagines he is married to the real Anne Frank (who secretly and miraculously survived the Holocaust).

Roth’s home town of Newark also often figured in his work. His final novel, Nemesis (2010), vividly recalls the panic that gripped the city during the polio scare of the 1940s.

Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933, to first-generation Americans — Herman Roth, an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, and his wife, the former Bess Finkel. They were Jews who “were and were not religious”, and they “didn’t talk about the past".

He winced when referred to as an American Jewish writer. “Growing up Jewish as I did and growing up American seemed to me indistinguishable,” he wrote.

Roth left Newark for Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, mainly out of restlessness, to escape his familiar home town and his father.

“I wanted something difficult and dangerous to happen to me. I wanted a hard time. Well, I got it,” Roth said in 1984. (Explaining the notoriety of Portnoy’s Complaint and his own in an essay titled Imagining Jews for the New York Review of Books in 1974, Roth wrote: “Going wild in public is the last thing in the world that a Jew is expected to do.”)

At Bucknell, he edited the literary magazine, was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honour society and conscientiously began to find his writer’s voice, ruthlessly critiquing a colleague in print and discovering “a flash of talent for comic destruction".

After graduating from Bucknell in 1954, he received a master’s degree in English the next year from the University of Chicago and served in the army for a year (largely behind a desk in Washington). He then returned to Chicago and taught English at his alma mater while writing fiction. An early admirer was novelist and future Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, who told an interviewer that Roth’s stories “showed a wonderful wit and great pace".

In 1957 Roth’s short story Defender of the Faith was accepted by the New Yorker. The portrayal of a young Jewish soldier ignobly demanding religious loyalty from his army superior — also Jewish — angered critics who worried about negative depictions of Jews.

When Goodbye, Columbus was accepted for publication in 1958, Roth resigned his teaching post and moved to Manhattan, but the friction with his antagonists wasn’t over.

Roth married Margaret Martinson, his first wife, in 1959. They separated in 1963, and in 1968 Martinson died in a car accident. The marriage was intensely difficult;  Roth painted his wife as stifling and manipulative in The Facts. The marriage contributed to an extended period in the 1960s when the novelist said he was barely able to write. The gap from 1962 to 1967 was the longest he ever went between publishing.

A regimen of psychoanalysis led to the neurosis-filled Portnoy’s Complaint, the riotous tale of one young Jewish man’s anxiety and excessive masturbation. An early stab at the book was a play called The Nice Jewish Boy, which in 1964 had a trial reading at New York’s American Place Theatre with Dustin Hoffman. (The script didn’t work.)

“There’s always something behind a book to which it has no seeming connection, something invisible to the reader which has helped unleash the writer’s impulse,” Roth said of Portnoy’s Complaint in the 1984 collection Writers at Work. “I’m thinking about the rage and rebelliousness that were in the air, the vivid examples I saw around me of angry defiance and hysterical opposition. This gave me a few ideas for my act.”

Portnoy’s Complaint drew criticism from Jewish groups for its perceived ethnic stereotyping and from others for its sexual explicitness. But it also won praise from prominent reviewers for being playful and moving, a masterpiece on guilt.

If Portnoy’s Complaint made Roth a household name, it also generated enduring jokes at his expense that likened him to the self-pleasuring title character. The most memorable was uttered by novelist Jacqueline Susann, who remarked on The Tonight Show that Roth may be a terrific writer, “but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him".

Beginning in the late 1970s and continuing through the 1980s, Roth and Bloom split their time between the United States and London. (They married in 1990 and divorced in 1995.) In 1989 Roth left his long-time publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for a $2.1 million, three-book deal with Simon & Schuster — at the time a huge and risky sum, skeptics suggested, for such an intensely literary author.

Roth endured knee surgery and then a quintuple bypass in 1989, in a period when he was addicted to the drug Halcion. That, in turn, triggered depression and emotional instability, as described by  Roth and Bloom (and as featured in Operation Shylock).

Roth was admitted for psychiatric care in 1993, and Bloom’s memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, says that on the admitting form Roth cited health concerns and bad reception for Operation Shylock.

In her book, Bloom draws herself as caged by an often wrathful Roth, describing his emotional gamesmanship as “Machiavellian". “Philip’s novels provided all one needed to know about his relationships with women,” Bloom wrote, “most of which had been just short of catastrophic.”

Roth’s powerful, probing, mocking literary voice didn’t translate in Hollywood, despite several attempts. A version of Portnoy’s Complaint, released in 1972 and starring Richard Benjamin and Karen Black, received scathing reviews. The Human Stain, released in 2003, starred Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. Elegy (2008), based on The Dying Animal, starred Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz and was seen as lacking Roth’s trademark ferocity.

Roth’s detractors included author Carmen Callil, who in 2011 noisily resigned as a judge of Britain’s Man Booker International Prize when the three-person panel chose Roth for its award.

“He goes on and on about the same subject in almost every single book,” Callil said. “It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.”

The Washington Post