Alone for eleven years on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.Walking the streets of New York after so many years away, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities. Revisiting the characters from Roth’s much-heralded The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an astounding leap into yet another phase in this great writer’s oeuvre.
In 1997 PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Award for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004."
Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award “for a body of work…of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship,” and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize.