The Sunday Read: ‘The Ghost Writer’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

The author Philip Roth, who died in 2018, was not sure whether he wanted to be the subject of a biography. In the end, he decided that he wanted to be known and understood. His search for a biographer was long and fraught — Mr. Roth parted ways with two, courted one and sued another — before he settled on Blake Bailey, one of the great chroniclers of America’s literary lives. Today on The Sunday Read, the journey of rendering a writer whose life was equal parts discipline and exuberance.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Back in February, I was in Portsmouth, Virginia,
0:03.4	at the home of literary biographer Blake Bailey.
0:06.4	After we had dinner, I asked him if I could see the papers.
0:11.4	He thought about it for a second, and then he said,
0:14.2	sure. So he took me up to his third floor,
0:17.2	where I saw these built-in filing cabinets,
0:20.2	and inside the cabinets,
0:21.6	hundreds of Manila envelopes with thousands of white pages inside them.
0:25.4	Notebooks, manuscripts, letters,
0:27.7	these were the papers of Philip Roth.
0:30.8	I couldn't help but ask Bailey.
0:32.7	Can I hold them?
0:34.0	And when he gave me some of the pages to hold,
0:35.9	what I thought was, I might be the last new person to even see these papers.
0:41.2	Blake Bailey had just written Philip Roth's biography,
0:43.6	and now that he was done,
0:45.0	many of these papers would be destroyed at Roth's own request.
0:49.3	My name is Mark Oppenheimer,
0:50.7	and I write for The New York Times magazine.
0:53.0	Blake Bailey spent six years with the Roth papers.
0:56.0	He read and reread Roth's 31 books.
0:58.6	He called all the Roth's friends, family, acquaintances.
	...

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