Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bai ley spent years poring over Roth’s personal archive, interviewing his friends, l overs, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conver sations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the po stwar literary scene.Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jew ish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly de railed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dis sident novelists behind the Iron Curtain.Leaving a Doll’s HouseTracing Roth’s pa th from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the Americ an Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth’s engagement with nearly every aspect of postwa r American culture.