Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centres on the summoning of the living to death and whose hero, "Everyman", is intended to be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth's "Everyman" is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation as a nine-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age, when he is undone by the death and deterioration of his contemporaries and relentlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful commercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. "Everyman" is a painful human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be. The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

菲利普·羅斯

一九九七年，菲利普·羅斯憑《美國牧歌》獲得普利策奬。一九九八年，他榮獲白宮頒發的美國國傢藝術奬章，並於二〇〇二年獲得美國藝術與人文學院最高奬——小說金奬，之前獲奬者包括約翰?多斯?帕索斯、威廉?福剋納、索爾?貝婁等。他曾分彆兩度獲得美國國傢圖書奬、美國筆會/福剋納奬和美國書評協會奬。

二〇〇五年，《反美陰謀》一書榮獲二〇〇三至二〇〇四年度美國曆史學傢協會奬，被該協會譽為“一部反映美國主題的曆史小說傑作”，並被《紐約時報?書評周刊》、《舊金山紀事報》、《波士頓環球報》、《芝加哥太陽時報》、《洛杉磯時報?書評周刊》、《華盛頓郵報?書評世界》、《時代》周刊、《新聞周刊》等許多報刊評選為年度好書。在英國，《反美陰謀》榮獲W.H.史密斯年度好書奬，菲利普?羅斯是該奬設立四十六年來第一位兩度獲奬的作傢。

二〇〇五年，羅斯成為第三位在世時被收入“美國文庫”齣版作品全集的美國作傢。這套八捲本文集計劃於二〇一三年齣齊。