News & Reviews

WORD: Philip Roth scores big, becomes first ever three-time PEN/Faulkner Award winner
Edited Press Release

Philip Roth’s novel 'Everyman' (Houghton Mifflin) has won the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, making Roth the first writer to receive the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. Roth took his first win in 1994 for 'Operation Shylock' and again in 2001 for 'The Human Stain'. The announcement was made today (February 26) by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Robert Stone, Chairman.

Four finalists were also named. They are Charles D’Ambrosio for 'The Dead Fish Museum' (Knopf); Deborah Eisenberg for 'Twilight of the Superheroes' (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux); Amy Hempel for 'The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel' (Scribner); and Edward P. Jones for 'All Aunt Hagar’s Children' (Amistad/HarperCollins).

The judges -- John Dufresne, Debra Magpie Earling, and David Gates -- considered close to 350 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2006 calendar year. Submissions came from over 90 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. There is no fee for a publisher to submit a book.

Founded in 1980, the PEN/Faulkner Award is the largest peer-juried prize for fiction in the United States. As winner, Roth receives $15,000. Each of the four finalists receives $5,000.

In a ceremony that celebrates the winner as "first among equals," all five authors will be honored during the 27th annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony on Saturday, May 12th at 7 pm at Folger Shakespeare Library, located at 201 East Capitol Street, SE, Washington, DC. Tickets are $100, and include the award ceremony followed by dinner and dancing. They can be purchased by phoning the Folger Box Office at (202) 544-7077 or online at the Pen/Faulkner website.

About the Winner

Praised as a brief masterpiece, admired for its precise physicality and lyrical brilliance, the honored novel, Everyman, takes as its subject an unnamed hero at the time of his death, being buried in a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey by his grown children, ex-wife, and a few friends. Its title drawn from the 15th century English morality play, Philip Roth’s novel describes the frailty, illness and deterioration of the hero’s body as he undergoes a series of medical procedures that frame his process of aging.

The narrative casts back across the ordinary life of this man: creative artist for an advertising agency, three-times married, father of two sons and a daughter, is filled with the enormous questions, longings, regrets, and desires, universal and elegantly detailed, that make up life.

"It's such a slim volume," says PEN/Faulkner judge Debra Magpie Earling, "and the book haunts me, its simplicity and brutishness, the unflinching look at life. Roth never looks away, never trivializes, never shrugs. He manages to wrestle with grief, the immensity of losing self."

In addition to the PEN/Faulkner Award, Roth has twice won The National Book Award and twice the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1997 he was honored with the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. He has been awarded the National Medal of Arts, and, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Gold Medal in Fiction. Roth divides his time between New York and Connecticut. Everyman is his 27th novel.

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