Philip Roth Challenges Wikipedia Editors

Philip Roth at a Newark lunch counter
(photo by Bob Peterson, Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Philip Roth recently publicly chided Wikipedia for publishing misleading information relating to his novel The Human Stain. According to a BBC account of the incident, Wikipedia administrators refused to correct the inaccurate entry, claiming "they required a second source." Incredibly, the author of a work of fiction was deemed insufficiently qualified to get the record about his or her own novel straight. Wikipedia's administrators have apparently come around, after this very public black eye, and amended the controversial claims

The novelist's open letter appeared in The New Yorker and has generated considerable media interest. Roth's crisp prose and cogent line of reasoning in this piece are a pleasure to read.

Philip Roth at 77

Philip Roth's new novel, Nemesis, is ready and waiting for readers. The book is Roth's 31st, most of which are novels. That number represents an incredible body of work, often written at a high level of skill and intellectual engagement. I have not read all thirty-one works -- very far from it. The publication of Nemesis also comes with Roth enduring interviewers from various media outlets. I watched one interview, a segment on "CBS Sunday Morning," in which the interviewer managed to come across as a smiling dunce. She spent much of the segment stating obvious points, drumming up personal history to no useful purpose, and making no attempt to understand why Roth writes.

There was one good moment which the interviewer almost accidentally elicited. She asked Roth about awards, and the 31-book man said (I'm paraphrasing) "I like awards. I like winning them." Good for you, Mr. Roth. It was a good, human moment, far away from the bromides of the "distinguished literary voice" supposedly above the needs of praise, the awards of ambition, the pettiness of vanity.

The illustration is the front cover from the German language edition of The Breast.