The novella ‘‘Goodbye, Columbus,’’ was first published in the 1959 collection, Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories, by Philip Roth, for which he received the National Book Award. Other stories in the collection include ''The Conversion of the Jews,'' "Epstein," "Defender of the Faith," "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song he Sings,’’ and ‘‘Eli, the Fanatic." "Goodbye, Columbus’’ was adapted to the screen in the 1969 movie by the same title, produced by Paramount, directed by Larry Peerce and starring Ali McGraw as Brenda Patimkin and Richard Benjamin as Neil Klugman.

Upon its publication, Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories received immediate and vehement condemnation by rabbis across the country, who considered Roth's portrayal of Jews and Judaism to be anti-Semitic, a viewpoint which they expressed in letters and sermons. As stated in the Gale Group's Contemporary Authors Online, it was to be ''the first of many Roth books to be castigated from the synagogue pulpits.’’ John N. McDaniel explains Roth's point of view and his response to his critics:

Roth has repeatedly answered his critics from the Jewish community by insisting that as a writer he has no obligation to write Jewish ''propaganda.’’... Jewish critics, Roth maintains, confuse the purpose of the writer with the purpose of the public relations man. Jews feel that Roth is ''informing'' on Jews when he should be providing a picture of the positive aspects of Jewish life; Roth argues that he is indeed an informer, but all that he has told the gentiles is that "the perils of human nature afflict the members of our minority.''

McDaniel defends Roth's work against charges of anti-Semitism on the grounds that his stories address more generalized human concerns in the literary mode of ‘‘social realism’’:

If we would understand Roth's intentions and achievements as a writer of fiction, we must look at his central characters not as Jews in an ideological, traditional, or metaphysical sense, but as men yearning to discover themselves by swimming into dangerous waters beyond social and familial structures: beyond the last rope. Only by so approaching Roth's fiction are we likely to see what it is that the stories are really about.

Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories remained popular despite censures from Jewish religious leaders. Its defenders praise the use of humor, the use of Jewish-American dialect, and the representation of the feelings of alienation of many post-War American Jews, caught between the guilt and trauma of the Holocaust and the forces of assimilation that came with post-War prosperity. Critics recognized Roth as a fresh, new voice in literature. As Irving Howe has observed, ‘‘His stories were immediately recognizable as his own, distinctive in voice, attitude, and subject....’’ McDaniel describes the stories in Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories as ‘‘sharp-edged and well-crafted.’’ Critics also praised Roth's use of humor. According to Joseph Epstein, this first volume by the young author demonstrated that ‘‘[Roth] is famously funny, dangerously funny, as Mel Brooks once characterized the kind of humor that can cause strokes from laughter.’’ Roth is also noted for his portrayal and commentary on American life. Categorizing Roth as a ‘‘social realist,’’ McDaniel claims that his works ‘‘illustrate important insights into America's cultural predicament as Roth sees it from his own vantage point: up close and personal.... No other living writer has so rigorously and actively attempted to describe the destructive element of experience in American life....’’

Roth's third novel, Portnoy's Complaint (1969), is his most well-known, most popular, and most controversial. The book immediately became highly controversial for its use of scatological language, bordering on the...