Newsmaker: Philip Roth

LONDON, England (CNN) -- He attracts the sort of accolades that writers usually get when they're dead. But at 74 Philip Roth is very much alive and producing work at an astounding rate.

On the eve of the publication of his latest (and 28th) book, "Exit Ghost," there has been a flurry of praise for Roth, including the accolade of "America's Greatest Living Author."

He is certainly one of the world's most decorated writers. Two of his works of fiction have won the National Book Award; two others were finalists. He has also won three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1997 novel, "American Pastoral."

In 2001, "The Human Stain" was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Despite the praise, Roth is not interested in being a celebrity author. "Fame is a worthless distraction," he has said. It drove him to distraction when his most famous book, "Portnoy's Complaint" published in 1969 sold 400,000 hardback copies and made him a star. But it was also derided as pornography and smut -- while the humorous nature of the book made many pigeon-hole him as a comic author.

He spent the next decades proving his gravitas as well as his wit. He spent 12 years living mostly in London and developed a fascination with Eastern European authors who labored under communism and censorship. After the break-up of his second marriage in 1989 he returned to America, fired up to write about his country that he now saw through fresh eyes.

The 90s was the start of Roth's renaissance. He published much of his best work in this decade including "American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain."

He explains his prodigious output as: "It may just be that at a certain point your talent is increased by the accrue of experience and knowledge. And I live in a remote part of the countryside, and I had the time, I guess I had the energy and I had the ideas -- and they just kept on coming."

UK newspaper The Times said: "With the possible exception of Saul Bellow, briefly his mentor, no other novelist provides a more comprehensive portrait of what it means to be an American intellectual in the latter half of the 20th century."

The Guardian newspaper compared him to another New Jersey son, Bruce Springsteen: "The sensation of reading Roth at his best reminds me of how it feels to listen to a great Bruce Springsteen song: There is a beguiling simplicity that masks a great truth, there is a respect for the lives and aspirations of ordinary people, and there is a willingness to confront the biggest questions there are."

While the big questions for Roth used to be about sex, increasingly the theme that occupies him is death. His recent novel "Everyman" (published last April spending 5 weeks on the hardback best seller list) deals with the operations, procedures and neurosis of an advertising man with a weak heart while "Exit Ghost" also explores the frailty of our bodies.

Of getting old, he told the Guardian in 2004: "I think about Hemingway and Faulkner and how it ended for them -- tragically, not peacefully in their sleep. Faulkner drank himself to death; Hemingway's body was banged to bits, the booze had saturated him and he couldn't write; he had nothing to live for, so he shot himself. These are lives of torment ... I'm not a romantic about writing, I don't want a tormented life and, by and large, I haven't had one. But these guys ... I can't stand to think about how they ended."

Roth is also pessimistic about the future of literature. "It feels to me like a dying moment for literary culture in my own country -- but you can't have computers and iPods and Blackberries ... and have time to sit for two or three hours with a book," he says. E-mail to a friend

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