Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity.

Maybe you have to go back to the very different Henry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language...

[14] The publication in 1969 of his fourth and most controversial novel, Portnoy's Complaint, gave Roth widespread commercial and critical success, causing his profile to rise significantly.

In The Plot Against America (2004), Roth imagines an alternative American history in which Charles Lindbergh, aviator hero and isolationist, is elected U.S. President in 1940, and the U.S. negotiates an understanding with Hitler's Nazi Germany and embarks on its own program of anti-Semitism.

Set in 1951, during the Korean War, it follows Marcus Messner's departure from Newark to Ohio's Winesburg College, where he begins his sophomore year.

"[22] In an October 2012 interview with the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles, Roth announced that he would be retiring from writing[24] and confirmed subsequently in Le Monde that he would no longer publish fiction.

Critic Jacques Berlinerblau noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education that these fictional voices create a complex and tricky experience for readers, deceiving them into believing they "know" Roth.

In the words of critic Hermione Lee:[31] Philip Roth's fiction strains to shed the burden of Jewish traditions and proscriptions.

The Human Stain, in which classics professor Coleman Silk's secret history is revealed, explores identity politics in the late 1990s.

A more satirical treatment of the patriotism and idealism of the war years is evident in Roth's comic novels, such as Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath's Theater.

In an essay published in The New York Times on Opening Day, 1973, Roth wrote that "baseball, with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategy, its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its 'characters,' its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate, was the literature of my boyhood... Of course, as time passed neither the flavor and suggestiveness of Red Barber's narration, nor specific details, vivid and revealing even as Rex Barney's pre-game hot dog, could continue to satisfy a developing literary appetite; there is no doubt, however, that they helped sustain me until I was old enough and literate enough to begin to respond to the great inventors of narrative detail and masters of narrative voice and perspective, like James and Conrad and Dostoyevsky and Bellow.

Martinson was the inspiration for female characters in several of Roth's novels, including Lucy Nelson in When She Was Good and Maureen Tarnopol in My Life as a Man.

When Bloom asked him to marry her, "cruelly, he agreed, on condition that she signed a pre-nuptial agreement that would give her very little in the event of a divorce—which he duly demanded two years later.

[49] Roth expressly banned any religious rituals from his funeral service, though it was noted that, the day after his burial, a pebble had been placed on top of his tombstone in accordance with Jewish tradition.

Roth won three PEN/Faulkner Awards (for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral.

[52] In 2003, literary critic Harold Bloom named Roth one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo.

[53] The Plot Against America (2004) won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005 and the Society of American Historians' James Fenimore Cooper Prize.

[55] The May 21, 2006, issue of The New York Times Book Review announced the results of a letter that was sent to what the publication described as "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years'".

American Pastoral tied for fifth, and The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America received multiple votes.

In the accompanying essay, A. O. Scott wrote: "Over the past 15 years, Roth's output has been so steady, so various and (mostly) so excellent that his vote has been, inevitably, split.

Scott notes that "The Roth whose primary concern is the past—the elegiac, summarizing, conservative Roth—is preferred over his more aesthetically radical, restless, present-minded doppelgänger by a narrow but decisive margin.

[57] President Barack Obama awarded Roth the 2010 National Humanities Medal in the East Room of the White House on March 2, 2011.

[60] One of the judges, Carmen Callil, a publisher of the feminist Virago house, withdrew in protest, referring to Roth's work as "Emperor's clothes".

[65][66][67] Ron Charles of The Washington Post wrote that "thundering obituaries" around the world noted that "he won every other honor a writer could win", sometimes even two or three times, except the Nobel Prize.

HBO dramatized Roth's The Plot Against America in 2020 as a six-part series starting Zoe Kazan, Winona Ryder, John Turturro, and Morgan Spencer.

John Updike, considered by many Roth's chief literary rival, said in 2008, "He's scarily devoted to the novelist's craft... [he] seems more dedicated in a way to the act of writing as a means of really reshaping the world to your liking.

His two greatest novels, American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater, have a controlled frenzy, a high imaginative ferocity, and a deep perception of America in the days of its decline.

The Zuckerman tetralogy remains fully alive and relevant, and I should mention too the extraordinary invention of Operation Shylock, the astonishing achievement of The Counterlife, and the pungency of The Plot Against America.

The responses have overflowed with a kind of blunt adoration that would be perfectly un-Rothlike if they weren't the efforts of children agonizing over the right way to bury our father.

We had come of age in more or less the same repressive 50s era in America—formalist, ironic, 'Jamesian', a time of literary indirection and understatement, above all impersonality—as the high priest TS Eliot had preached: 'Poetry is an escape from personality.'