Jewish Wheaties

Roth travels with Barbara Sproul to Asia, while maintaining his opposition to the Vietnam War; his writing turns to satire in a general effort to undermine seriousness in politics and literature Baseball, long a love of Roth’s, emerges in his lengthy burlesque novel, The Great American Novel followed by his semi-autobiographical My Life as a Man (1974), a rebuke to his first wife, Maggie. In the midst of his writing, a bitter legal encounter with Norman Mailer involving the young writer Alan Lelchuk occurs, at the same time he develops a friendship with the important Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, who admired Roth’s rewrite of Kafka, The Breast. But he also experiences sustained criticism from Irving Howe which he never forgot. Roth unexpectedly changes publishers leaving Random House for Holt with a new editor and soon-to-be friend, Aaron Asher.