Letting Go

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Philip Roth's first novel, published in 1962, follows Gabe Wallach, a young English instructor at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. He becomes entangled in the lives of a fellow teacher, Paul Herz, and his fragile wife, Libby, whose struggles with money, marriage and the wish to adopt a child test Gabe's ideas about responsibility, freedom and what people owe one another.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”