Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Walt Whitman, Henry James, and Sylvia Plath are but a few who put their letters and journals into the fire. Many literary figures have dreaded the spectre of the biographer. And until he died, in 2018, he spent a great deal of energy courting biographers, hoping that they would tell his story in a way that wouldn’t undermine his art or his legacy. The predatory dimension of one person telling the story of another: Roth wrangled with the theme throughout his career. “There’s paper on my desk,” Lonoff tells Zuckerman once they are left alone in the house.

The clues to his puzzle.” The clues become another writer’s material. “When you admire a writer you become curious,” Zuckerman admits. Hope, refusing the self-abnegating existence of Tolstoy’s wife, walks out. Lonoff has betrayed his wife, Hope, with a former student named Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman somehow imagines to be none other than Anne Frank. In the course of an overnight stay, Zuckerman is witness to his idol’s domestic implosion.

Lonoff, an eminent novelist living in the New England woods. The story begins when Zuckerman, a young writer who has just published his first short stories, pays a visit to E. I. It was the first of nine novels by Philip Roth narrated by Nathan Zuckerman.

“ The Ghost Writer” was published in 1979.

Philip roth portnoy