Lori Lefkovitz says she “gave up” on author Philip Roth when she was in high school and he was shocking America with his portrayal of a lustful lawyer in Portnoy’s Complaint.
“In his youth, he was all about the male libido,” says Lefkovitz, now a literature professor at Northeastern. “It was only as I matured as a reader that I was encouraged to go back to him and realized that he had matured as well.”
Roth, a leading figure in 20th-century literature, died on Tuesday at age 85. He wrote more than two dozen novels, often exploring sex, death, and Jewish life.
