Everyman

Product Description

Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centres on the summoning of the living to death & whose hero, Everyman, is intended to be the personification of mankind.

The fate of Roth's Everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers & during his hospitalisation as a nine-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, & into his old age, when he is undone by the death & deterioration of his contemporaries & relentlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful commercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons who despise him & a daughter who adores him, the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, & the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage.

Everyman is a painful human story of the regret & loss & stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be. The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, & its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.