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Nathan Zuckerman is Philip Roth's famous alter ego and the one with the most detailed life story. What has driven me to study Zuckerman's biography is something he says to the older writer Lonoff, whose life he is trying to explain in the novel The Ghost Writer (1979/2007). Lonoff seems puzzled by Zuckerman's interpretations and asks him:
“And all of this is recorded where? Hedda Hopper?”
“Some there. The rest I pieced together myself.”
“To what end?”
“When you admire a writer you become curious. You look for his secret. The clues to his puzzle.” (p. 33)
But this is Zuckerman replying to Lonoff, and of course, Roth would not agree that it is possible to find his own secrets. Roth has spent decades leading us to believe that he is either fictionalizing his own biography or offering autobiographies and “confessions” that insinuate they should not be believed. Jeffrey Berman writes in The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth: “Roth both encourages and discourages public scrutiny of his life” (, p. 94). As Zuckerman says in The Facts (1988/1997), Roth is a “walking text” (p. 162). But so also is Zuckerman, and