The death of a great American writer

Woke up about 15 minutes ago to the sad news that Philip Roth has died at 85. Roth was without question among the great English-language writers of his time and ours - among the pantheon of Updike, Bellow, Munro, and Trevor. Of these only Munro is survives, and I believe she (like Roth some years ago) has retired from writing. Of them all, as a fellow American, male, white, Jewish literary aspirant from Essex County, I felt the closest to Roth. I knew very well his childhood landscape of the Newark and the western suburbs (the title story in his first collection, Goodbye, Columbus, was set on the streets where I first lived), and his novels have been part of my life for as long as I have been a reader. I've posted on his work many times on this blog, and will probably do so again as I'm sure I'll go back to read many of his works - many have recommended rereading The Plot Against America, a strangely prophetic story about a right-wing presidency - but what comes to mind this morning  in the immediate wake of this sad news are beautiful moments in many of his works: the description of glove-making and the encounter with the daughter under the highway in Newark, the visit to the cemetery and to the childhood haunts in Asbury Park in Sabbath's theater, this hilarious concept of Jews returning from Israel to the desecrated shtetls of Eastern Europe advanced by a shyster named "Philip Roth" in Operation Shylock, this shocking (in its time) sexuality of Portnoy's Complaint, the boy on the roof of the temple in the story The Conversion of the Jews, the sorrowful and tender recollections of Roth Sr. in Patrimony, the images of Newark in a hot summer during the polio epidemic in his final work, Nemesis, and more - but I'll leave it there for the moment. Although, especially in my years as a books editor, I got to meet many great writers (including another gone last week, Tom Wolfe), I never met Roth. Probably just as well. I know him in the way we "know" all the great writers we read and admire, the living and the dead. I am sure that much of his life was a struggle - to write, to live with the opprobrium that followed publication of many of his books, to overcome serious physical pain and mental strain - but out of this struggle he has produced great art and insight into our time and place. May he rest in peace.