If you Google the phrase literary lion, here is one of the first definitions that will be returned to you for the effort: “Noun: a noted author who has reached celebrity status.” And, then: “Examples: Philip Roth is a literary lion.”
With that, once again, Dictionary.com cuts to the chase. Literary lion is, fittingly, being used a lot today, along with “towering” and “preeminent” and “incomparable,” as the world comes to terms with the melancholy fact that Philip Roth is no longer in it. The obituaries' soaring language is often accompanied, as per the mandates of internet protocol, by searing URLs—“philip-roth-dead,” The New York Times reports of the novelist who, elsewhere in its assessment, has been “borne aloft by an extraordinary second wind”—and there is a certain aptness to the collision: Philip Roth, literary lion, had little patience for lionizing. Embracing that quintessential writerly mandate, “Write what you know,” he wrote about Newark. He wrote about glove factories. He wrote about fathers. He wrote about sons. He wrote about Jewishness, and lust, and one very unfortunate piece of organ meat. He wrote about America. And he wrote about the body—specifically, through the translucent veneer of fiction, his own: its appetites, its indignities, its absurdities, its inevitabilities.
Read Full Article »