Nathan Zuckerman: Between the Sacred Fount and the Ivory Tower, or the Fall of the Artist as a Hero

This essay shows that Philip Roth's fictitious writer, in the course of the nine books that compose the Zuckerman series, illustrates the evolution of the fictionally represented artist since Goethe and Rousseau. From the young pre-Romantic writer yearning for the nineteenth-century artistic tradition, to the the old novelist who has reached a twenty-first-century Ivory Tower from which he recognizes his mistakes as a man and artist, Roth's fictitious writer positions himself in literary history as the postmodern anti-hero of our age.