My Life as a Fan (of Philip Roth)

A little homage to the writer who made me want to write.

He was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for my first years of high school I seem to have believed there was no other writer worth reading nor emulating. I first encountered Roth as so many others have: as a young teenager (probably 14) with a dog-eared copy of Portnoy's Complaint, which I purloined from the bookshelf on the headboard of my pa…