Phillip Roth

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary
awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award
for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book
Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer
Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He
won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union
for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year
he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House.
Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award
for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book
Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959).

In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a
trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar
America. For The Human Stain Roth received his
second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith
Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received
the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six
years "for the entire work of the recipient."