The Philip Roth
Personal Library

“…A Student of His Times,
a Creature of His Times,

A Leading Contributor to Its Culture”

The Newark-born American writer Philip Roth left his entire personal library of approximately 7,000 volumes, books accumulated by him from 1950 to the present, to the Newark Public Library. The Philip Roth Personal Library (PRPL) is housed on the second floor of the Main Library next to Centennial Hall. Many books bear Roth’s handwritten comments, notes, and underlinings and will be accessible for study and perusal.

The PRPL furnishes a home for the books collected over a lifetime by a renowned son of Newark who, having been presented with every major American literary award and those of France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and having received over a dozen honorary doctorates from distinguished American universities, is acknowledged universally as among the most eminent American fiction writers of his time—the second half of the 20th century and the opening decade of the 21st. Roth retired from writing in 2010 with the publication of the last of his thirty-one books, Nemesis, a novel that renders the destruction wrought on Newark by a fictional 1944 polio epidemic.

The PRPL provides members of the reading community, students particularly, with an opportunity to become familiar with the intellectual and imaginative works that sustained his mind and his work along with the books that served as reference and source material for any number of his novels.

Roth’s library comprises books of fiction, history, biography, poetry, drama, cultural and literary criticism, sociology, and psychology collected over the historical decades by one who was a student of his times, a creature of his times, and, of course, a leading contributor to its culture. It is a prominent example of a personal library kept not only by a greatly accomplished novelist but by a cultivated reader of the second half of the 20th century.

Roth’s library, like many of his most esteemed novels, is embedded in American history and literature. The PRPL offers a pertinent setting for educational encounters for individuals and groups who have an interest in the work of Philip Roth. To the best of our knowledge, only a very few of the personal libraries of major American writers have been preserved in their entirety for the edification of the public.

The Philip Roth Personal Library cultivates creative expression through written and spoken word by providing a literary destination and educational hub where patrons, students, and visitors experience the imaginative combustion that can happen when reading and writing intersect, as they did in Philip Roth's fiction.

We invite you to visit the Philip Roth Personal Library inaugural exhibition, always on view during regular library hours.