Treating Philip Roth as a war writer-as well as a sportswriter, crime reporter, political commentator, and Newark chronicler-Roth's Wars: A Career in Conflict offers a thoroughly researched account of the novelist's preoccupation with wars around the world and wars at home. This wide-ranging social and cultural history of Roth's career examines intersections between Roth's preoccupations as a writer and the work of contemporaries, such as J.D. Salinger, Joan Didion, George Plimpton, Hannah Arendt, E.L. Doctorow, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Herr, and Don DeLillo. The legends and icons who figure in this account of Roth's career include Dwight Eisenhower, Meyer Lansky, Ernie Pyle, Bob Dylan, Johnny Appleseed, Anne Frank, JFK, Mickey Mantle, the Marx Brothers, Thomas Paine, Sandy Koufax, and Franz Kafka.

James D. Bloom is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College. He is the author of Gravity Fails: The Jewish Shaping of Modern America, Literary Bent: In Search of High Art in Contemporary American Writing, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Jospeh Freeman, and The Stock of Available Reality: R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman.