Book Q&A: Writing on Philip Roth

Claudia Roth Pierpont is the author of the forthcoming Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, a study of the novelist Philip Roth, who is no relation. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, she also is the author of Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, a collection of essays. She lives in New York City. Q: Why did you decide to write about Philip Roth? A: The simple answer is that I think he’s a great writer, one of the greatest novelists of the century. I was working on a collection of pieces about American figures that was published in The New Yorker. I wanted it to end with him. I met him, and he was accommodating and easy to talk to; I thought, This is the chance of a lifetime! It seemed like an opportunity I’d be mad to pass up....

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Book Q&A: John Rosengren on Hank Greenberg

John Rosengren is the author most recently of a biography, Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes. His other books include Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid: The Year that Changed Baseball Forever, Alone in the Trenches: My Life as a Gay Player in the NFL (written with Esera Tuaolo), and Bladesof Glory: The True Story of a Young Team Bred to Win. He lives in Minneapolis. Q: Why did you decide to write a biography of Hank Greenberg? A: Because he was one of the most significant figures in American history. As a Hall of Fame baseball player, he had this stage—the game in the 1930s and ‘40s was the national pastime—at a time when there was strong ethnic identity, much stronger than today. In the first two decades of the 20th century, people grew up in neighborhoods surrounded by people from their ...

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