Preserving words of a provocateur

Cementing his position as one of America’s leading 20th century literary voices, Philip Roth will see the nonprofit Library of America publish an eight-volume collection of his novels and stories beginning later this summer.

Roth, a two-time National Book Award winner, joins Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty as the only American writers to have their complete works preserved by the Library of America during their lifetimes.

“We feel that Roth is one of the most important writers in the second half of the 20th century,” Library of America publisher Max Rudin said Monday. “As the series begins to broach that whole [postwar] literary era, it seemed like an appropriate project.”

The first two volumes cover Roth’s works through 1972 and will be available later this month with the final installment out by 2013 -- when Roth turns 80. Rudin said no decision has been made on whether to include Roth’s published works of criticism.

The first volumes include two of Roth’s most controversial books: “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959), which examined Jewish identity and class divisions on the cusp of the 1960s sexual revolution, and “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969), a novel that delved even more deeply into those themes through the sex-obsessed, psychiatrist’s-couch memoir of Alexander Portnoy.

Initially backed by the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the Library of America published its first books in 1982 on a mission to preserve what it considers the most significant of American writing.

Beginning with the works of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, the foundation has published 158 volumes, encompassing the works of some 100 authors, plus anthologies of such specialized literature as journalism from the Vietnam War.

The series has earned high praise for its breadth and for the books themselves -- made to last for years with high-quality, acid-free paper bound to let them open flat. And they are dense: The first two Roth volumes are each about an inch thick, about the same as a conventional book, but together total 1,632 pages and cost $35 each.

Roth has been a literary provocateur, raising the hackles of fellow Jews (he has been called a Jewish anti-Semite) and making critics a generation ago uneasy over his satirical explorations of sex. But he has also won wide acclaim, including four major literary prizes in the 1990s alone, for a body of work capturing the complexity of individual life against the backdrops of ethnic history and modern society.

Rudin said Roth’s selection arose as the foundation was putting together the collected works of Bellow, whose novels exploring modern American life -- and Jewish identity -- won the Nobel Prize. That Roth preceded other contemporary writers such as John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates in having his works preserved had more to do with serendipity than any rating system.

“There’s a long list of writers we think merit inclusion,” Rudin said without detailing who was under consideration. “When they are published has more to do with accidents of literary history and timing.”

Roth’s more recent novels, such as his trilogy of “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain,” and last year’s “The Plot Against America” have overwhelmed Roth’s early novels, Rudin said.

“I think readers will welcome the opportunity to go back and read that work that established his reputation,” Rudin said. “Roth’s stature is large and looking over that mountain back at the early work will have new revelations.”

Roth’s debut, the novella “Goodbye, Columbus,” published with five short stories, won the 1960 National Book Award, which Rudin described as “an accomplished literary debut. Those stories do not seem like the work of a 20-something-year-old at all. It’s remarkable.”

It’s also hard, given the cultural shifts that followed, to look at that initial story -- a tale of a summer of lust, the awkwardness of discussing birth control in the pre-pill era and the chaste expectations of parents -- and understand how it was considered daring literature.

“It was not only controversial, but outrageous,” Rudin said. “It’s interesting now to read that work in the cultural context of the ‘60s. It will be read now as one of the great literary expressions of that time.... It just shows you how fast history moved in the ‘60s. Things that were controversial in the late-’50s, 10 years later were not even eyebrow-raising.”