On August 19, 2001, more than 1,200 people gathered to see author Philip Roth receive the 42nd MacDowell Medal. Author William Styron, himself a Medalist in 1988, served as the selection committee chairman and acted as presentation speaker for the event. Also on the selection committee were Robert Brustein, Elizabeth Hardwick, Brad Leithauser, and Wendy Wasserstein.

William Styron and Philip Roth’s friendship was evident by the mutual admiration and camaraderie shown during the ceremony. Styron praised Roth not only for his impressive writing, but also for his weathering the rocky roads sometimes created for fiction writers who dare push the envelope of public opinion or taste. Styron noted during his speech, “Philip’s writing has powerful elements of the transgressive, the shocking, the contumacious… but since the good boy and bad boy are in perpetual conflict… the result — as in such superb recent novels like American Pastoral and The Human Stain — is kind of majestic equipoise.”

Styron also felt that Roth has been able to achieve what all fiction writers strive for — to create a believable reality in which the reader can dwell. “Philip Roth, in his long and productive career, has written book after book in which his scrupulous artistry has allowed us a unique vision of the times — the nearly half century — we’ve lived in... He has caused to be lodged in our collective consciousness a small, select company of human beings who are as arrestingly alive and as fully realized as any in modern fiction.”

After accepting the medal, Roth spoke of his friendship with Styron and his experiences as a writer of his generation. “Right from day one when we met in Rome, he [Styron] just accepted that I was a peer and it was thrilling for me. He’s been like that always. So what he did here today is just a continuation of what began in Rome in 1959, 1960.”