THE LOVE FRACTURES YOU

As one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, Philip Roth chronicled male lust and erotic life with unflinching honesty. At the start of his career, the twenty-eight-year- old’s personal life was in shambles. Seeking an escape from a troubled marriage, Roth fell into a series of affairs. None would save him. An exclusive first look at an extraordinary new biography.

- Blake Bailey

PHILIP ROTH’S FIRST MARRIAGE WAS A DISASTER. In 1956, as a twenty-three-year-old instructor at the University of Chicago, Roth had met Maggie Martinson, a campus secretary who was almost five years his senior and had two children from a previous marriage. Two and a half years into their chaotic, on-again, off-again relationship, Roth tried to end things once and for all; at the time, his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, was about to be published, which would lead to his becoming the youngest-ever winner of the National Book Award, at age twenty-six. In desperation, Maggie lied that she was pregnant, and when Roth asked her to get a rabbit test, she found an obviously pregnant woman in Tompkins Square Park and paid her two or three dollars for a jar of urine. Almost three years later—as recounted in the excerpt here—the couple were married and living with Maggie’s troubled eleven-year-old daughter, Helen (a pseudonym), in Iowa City, where Roth taught at the Writers’ Workshop and struggled to finish his first full-length novel, Letting Go.