I had a few things in common with Philip Roth. We’re both Jewish men raised in Essex County, New Jersey—he in the Weequahic neighborhood in the city of Newark, where most of his protagonists were born and a number of his books are set, and I in the neighboring town of South Orange, a pleasant suburb that is rumored to be where the woman who inspired Brenda Patimkin, Neil Klugman’s love interest in the novella Goodbye, Columbus, actually lived. (She was raised in Newstead, the wealthiest neighborhood in town, which, even in the ’90s, was casually referred to as “Jewstead.”) Despite being a bookish weisenheimer, I didn’t encounter Roth until college, when I read Portnoy’s Complaint and then took an life-altering class on Roth and John Updike—never before had I known that literature could be like this, an explosive unraveling of inner thoughts verbalized on the page. Roth soon became my favorite writer, and in the following years I consumed his complete oeuvre.

What made Roth unique? The gleeful vulgarity, for starters. When Seinfeld aired its infamous episode “The Contest” in 1992, the word “masturbation” was never spoken; Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969, has a chapter titled “C**T CRAZY.” (The book does not include the asterisks.) It’s obligatory when writing about Roth’s career to mention the piece of liver that Alexander Portnoy masturbates into and then eats with his family for dinner. David Kepesh, Kafkaesquely transformed into a 155-pound mammary gland in The Breast, yells to a nurse, “I get so excited I want to f**k you! I want you to sit on my nipple—with your c**t!” Mickey Sabbath urinates on his dead lover’s grave at the end of Sabbath’s Theater. The headline of the New Yorker‘s initial post on Roth’s death called him the “Seminal American Novelist”—double entendre intended? The (possibly) dirty pun was changed the next day, a prudishness alien to the Rothian spirit.