Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character created by the writer Philip Roth, who uses him as his protagonist and narrator, a type of alter ego, in many of his novels.
Discrepancies (including date of birth, details of his upbringing, and personal background) exist between the characters, leading most to consider this an early version, and not necessarily the Zuckerman around whom subsequent novels would revolve.
In later books, Roth uses Zuckerman as a protagonist, starting with the 1979 novel The Ghost Writer, where he is a writing apprentice on a pilgrimage to cull the wisdom of the reclusive author E. I. Lonoff.
[3] By creating parallels between Zuckerman's life as a novelist (with the novel Carnovsky a stand-in for his Portnoy's Complaint) and his own, Roth expressed his interest in the relationship between an author and his work.
He reintroduced Zuckerman as witness and narrator in a trilogy of historical novels: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), set in the period from the 1960s into the 1990s.