Includes bibliographical references (pages 287-294) and index.

"Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels. He "worked hard and long and diligently" to be frivolous - an effort that resulted in the notoriously immature Portnoy's Complaint (1969). Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious "pursuit of the unserious." But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity - an American one that includes Emerson, Melville and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism. In Philip Roth's Rude Truth - one of the first major studies of Roth's career as a whole - Ross Posnock examines Roth's "mature immaturity" in all its depth and richness."--Jacket.

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