Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey) is an American novelist. He gained early literary fame for the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus, grabbed headlines with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint, and has continued to write noted literary works, many of which featured his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels started with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and include the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997).