Philip Roth's Zuckerman Novels

About Zuckerman Roth

Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman novels span nine books from 1979 to 2007. The Counterlife (1986) is the most formally experimental — five competing narrative versions of the same events involving Nathan and his brother Henry, the novel that most explicitly interrogates its own fictional premises and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It follows the first Zuckerman tetralogy (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy) and precedes the American trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain) that uses Zuckerman as narrator for three panoramic portraits of American life. The Counterlife is the pivot point between Roth's early, more personal Zuckerman and his late, more historical mode.