"One of America's Preeminent 20th Century Novelists"

"'I don't know yet what this will all add up to, and it no longer matters, because there's no stopping,' he told the New Yorker. 'And this stuff is not going to matter anyway, as we know. So there's no sense even contemplating it, you know? All you want to do is the obvious. Just get it right, and the rest is the human comedy: the evaluations, the lists, the crappy articles, the insults, the praise.'"

Scott Martelle at the Los Angeles Times writes an obit for Philip Roth.