“The American adventure was one’s engulfing fate,” Philip Roth once said, referring to the moment in post–World War II American history when his family truly felt their “American claim.” This line might just as accurately apply to Roth’s writing life as it does his family life, as in his fiction he traverses the complexity, tragedy, humor, joy, and absurdity of the American adventure over the course of his six-decade career. The sheer range of phenomena Roth addresses – from identity politics to gender politics to political correctness, from maturity to mortality, from art to propaganda, from pleasure to pain – makes Charles McGrath’s elegiac description of Roth as “prolific, protean, and blackly comic” particularly apt.