With his last three books, each of them published in the 1990s, Philip Roth has won three major American literary awards. In 1991, for Patrimony, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1993, for Operation Shylock, he won the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1995, for Sabbath's Theater he won the National Book Award.

Mr. Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933. He was educated at Bucknell University and the University of Chicago. Since 1972 he has lived in Connecticut. American Pastoral is his twenty-second book.