The Humbling

Everything is over for Simon Axler. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent and his assurance. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can't persuade him to make a comeback. In this long day's journey into night, told with Roth's inimitable urgency, bravura and gravity, all our life's performances - talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation - are stripped bare.

In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for 'the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.'

Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work...of enduring originality and consummate craftmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of achievement over a sustained career...places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.'

Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.