The Anatomy Lesson

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Philip Roth's 1983 novel, the third Zuckerman book, finds Nathan Zuckerman at forty, famous, alone and suffering from a mysterious pain in his neck and shoulders that no doctor can cure. Unable to write, attacked by a critic and nursed by several women, he decides to give up literature and go back to Chicago to become a doctor, with comic and painful results.

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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.”