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Philip Roth, one of America's most acclaimed and inventive authors, will be at the MacDowell Colony in August to accept the 2001 Edward MacDowell Medal. The Medal is awarded each year to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the arts. Mr. Roth joins an impressive list of past recipients, including Aaron Copland, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, I.M. Pei, Ellsworth Kelly, and Joan Didion. He is the 14th writer to receive the award since it was first given in 1960.

“Philip Roth has created a large body of work that has to be counted as one of the preeminent literary achievements of modern times,” notes 1988 Medal recipient William Styron, who chaired this year's selection committee, which also included authors Elizabeth Hardwick and Brad Leithauser, critic Robert Brustein, and playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

Mr. Roth will be presented the honor in a public ceremony during the annual Medal Day celebrations on Sunday, August 19, 2001, beginning at 12:15 p.m., on the Colony grounds at 100 High Street in Peterborough. Joining Mr. Styron in presenting the award will be Robert MacNeil, chairman of the Colony. Carter Wiseman, president of the board, Executive Director Cheryl Young, and Resident Director David Macy will also speak.

After the ceremony, there will be an interval for picnic lunches. Visitors may bring their own lunch or reserve a catered basket through the Colony. Artists-in-residence will open their studios to the public from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. Medal Day is the only time each year that studios are open to the public.  There is no charge to attend the ceremony or the open studios.

Hailed as one of America's most inventive authors, Roth published his first story, “Philosophy, or Something Like That,” in 1954 in the Bucknell University literary magazine Et Cetera, which he helped to found and edit. His debut collection, Goodbye, Columbus, followed five years later and was recognized with a National Book Award for Fiction. These early stories are marked by the witty, ironic perceptions of life in all its absurdity that have since become trademarks of his writing.

Roth's third novel, Portnoy's Complaint, published in 1969, caused a stir with a comic representation of the middle-class Jewish world of Alexander Portnoy, its sex-obsessed teenage protagonist. Prominent among Roth's later works has been a series featuring the author's fictional alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman. 

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, Roth has lived in Rome, London, Chicago and New York, and currently resides in Connecticut. He was educated at Bucknell and the University of Chicago, and has worked as a critic, educator and editor. He inaugurated the Penguin book series, “Writers from the Other Europe,” introducing the work of such writers as Bruno Schulz and Milan Kundera to American audiences.

Philip Roth's books have achieved a rare balance between popular audience and critical acclaim, garnering him two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, and two PEN/Faulkner Awards. In 1998 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, American Pastoral, and received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton. The Dying Animal, Roth's most recent novel, was published by Houghton Mifflin in May of this year.