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New York (AFP) – Tributes poured in Wednesday following the death of Philip Roth, the American literary giant whose prolific career as a novelist, essayist and critic chronicled the American experience in the 20th century.

Roth’s death Tuesday night in a Manhattan hospital, from congestive heart failure, was confirmed by The Wylie Agency who represented him.

He is expected to be buried next week at Bard College, where he had previously taught, his biographer Blake Bailey told AFP. A memorial is also being planned in New York, possibly in September, Bailey added.

A writer who influenced generations of readers and thinkers, from Barack Obama to Zadie Smith, his death left the literary world in mourning for a writer best known for exploring American themes, the Jewish experience and male sexuality, often with darkly comic humor.

“He was a giant, an artist as versatile and virtuoso as Sinatra, acidulous and subversive as Groucho, charming and formidable as Feynman, graceful and fireballing as Koufax,” wrote novelist and short-story writer Michael Chabon.

“I’m in a state of shock. I’m stunned and speechless. He was a truth teller,” CNN reported friend and writer Judith Thurman as saying.

“American treasure,” tweeted the actress and activist Mia Farrow with a picture of Roth receiving the National Humanities Medal from Obama in 2010, the year his last novel, “Nemesis” was published.

Roth was widely considered the last living great, white, male American novelist, who along with Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and John Updike helped define what it meant to be American in the latter half of the 20th century.

– Nobel snub –

He found fame with the wildly graphic “Portnoy’s Complaint” in 1969 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for “American Pastoral.” His “Plot against America” found renewed significance under the Donald Trump presidency and he published “Nemesis,” his final novel, in 2010, before announcing his retirement in 2012.

The author of some two dozen novels, his titanic literary stature was rooted in the universality of his message. “I don’t write Jewish, I write American,” he said in his own words.

A prolific essayist, critic and novelist, the 1990s were the height of his productivity, exemplified by his widely admired trilogy — “American Pastoral” (1997), “I Married a Communist” (1998) and “The Human Stain” (2000).

The decorated author won a litany of major awards in the United States and around the world, but the coveted Nobel Literature Prize eluded him.

Being snubbed for the Nobel every year had “become a joke” for the author, said his friend, French writer Josyane Savigneau, on Wednesday.

“Every year we talked about it, it became funny,” Savigneau said. Great writers such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce also missed out on the prize, she noted.

Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the grandson of European Jews who were part of the 19th-century wave of immigration to the United States. His father was an insurance broker.

– ‘Driven perfectionist’ –

In 2012, Roth confirmed that “Nemesis” would be his last novel, after having reread all his books.

“I decided that I was done with fiction,” he said. 

“I don’t want to read any more of it, write any more of it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore… It’s enough. I no longer feel this dedication to write what I have experienced my whole life.”

Thurman said that after he stopped writing Roth spent his free time reading and swimming, and meeting friends.

“He was such a driven perfectionist, so when he felt his power ebbing, he wanted to quit at the top of his game, and he did,” she was quoted as saying by CNN.

Roth acknowledged as much in an interview this year with The New York Times, saying he was “by this time no longer in possession of the mental vitality or the physical fitness needed to mount and sustain a large creative attack of any duration.”

Times book critic Dwight Garner paid tribute to a “peerless chronicler of sex and death,” an “archwizard” whose best books “eat into the mind like acid.”

“The death of Philip Roth marks, in its way, the end of a cultural era as definitively as the death of Pablo Picasso did in 1973,” he wrote.

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