Patrimony : A True Story

With the honesty of a skilled biographer and the sensitivity of a caring son, Roth chronicles the life of his father, Herman, in this gripping work which won a 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award. Roth holds little back in describing his father as a man of rare intensity and fierce independence who, for better or worse, stood by his principles and held others to his own rigorous standards. Writes Roth, “His obsessive stubbornness–his stubborn obsessiveness–had very nearly driven my mother to a breakdown in her final years.” Frank throughout, Roth calls his father “a pitiless realist, but I wasnt his offspring for nothing, and I could be pretty realistic, too.”