Editor’s Column

Dear Readers:

With this, the first issue of the tenth volume of Philip Roth Studies, I am stepping down as executive editor. I have not made this decision lightly, as I am the founder of the journal and have been its guiding force since its inception in 2003. Needless to say, I have a heavy investment in the journal’s continuing success and growth, and I am confident that Roth Studies’ best days are yet to come. What’s more, I have had the good fortune, and have thoroughly enjoyed, overseeing this publication while working with an incredible group of individuals who have participated in this endeavor. This includes our impressive list of essay contributors—well over 100 since our inaugural issue—including the ones composing the current issue. This is a particular strong one, in fact, featuring insightful essays by James Duban, Patrick Silvey, Claudia Franziska Brühwiler, Inbar Kaminsky, David Houston, and Jacques Berlinerblau (our current book review editor, with an essay that was accepted before he joined our editing team). This is a particularly exciting issue, and I am proud to be going out with such an impressive company of scholars. It merely underscores the satisfaction and enjoyment I get from reading great Roth scholarship. But I feel that after eleven years of overseeing the journal, it is time to pass on the reins to others who can handle all editing tasks and take the journal in new and exciting directions.

In making this decision, a marker in my professional career, I cannot help but look back at the history of Roth Studies and how I was able to make this publication a reality. When I founded the Philip Roth Society in 2002, one of the questions I was asked most often was, “When are you going to start a journal?” At the time I was amazed that people would ask me this question over and over, especially since a lot of hard work went into the founding of the society itself (e.g., getting a mailing list, finding interested individuals, drafting a constitution, finding like-minded scholars to work alongside, initiating elections, getting exposure at a variety of conferences). I thought, “Isn’t it enough that I got the society going? And now you want me to take the professional plunge and commit to founding a peer-reviewed journal?!” The only publication that we had at the time was the Philip Roth Society Newsletter, and I had started that—serving as its editor for its first two volume years—not only as a way to solidify the membership, but as a testing ground for the kind of things we might do in the future once we were able to get a journal going (which I had assumed would be years in the future). In the newsletter I ran membership-related news and information, but I also included essays that reflected the reading, teaching, and appreciation of Philip Roth’s fiction. (In fact, Jessica G. Rabin, who would go on to become the society’s secretary/treasurer and Roth Studies’ associate editor, was the very first to share her writing in the newsletter.) As the Roth Society headed into its second year in 2003, I had assumed that the newsletter would be enough, and that a journal may be a possibility once the society matured.

Nonetheless, I was constantly dogged with questions about the viability of a new peer-reviewed journal. I felt at the time that it was easy for people to ask for such a journal—they would not be the ones doing the heavy lifting in founding a journal and investing their careers in such an endeavor—but it was something else entirely to bring this idea to fruition. At the same time, I did begin to put out feelers, asking several well-established scholars, especially those who were leaders in other scholarly societies, what their thoughts were about starting a new peer-reviewed journal. The response I got from those in the know was almost always the same: wait a few years until the Roth Society is solidly founded and has grown its membership...