Philip Roth: “In some ways he never left Newark. It was home to his imagination.”

From a story, Philip Roth’s $2 million library gift,  in the Wall Street Journal:

Philip Roth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, quietly arranged to give at least $2 million of his estimated $10 million estate to the Newark, N.J., public library before his death last year.

Friends say he intended his bequest to aid not just the library but the struggling city, where he grew up and which featured prominently in his writing. Before he died, the Newark Public Library announced that Mr. Roth had decided to give it his personal book collection. . . .

The author had great affection for his hometown but was also keenly aware of its challenges: He chronicled the city’s 1967 riots in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Pastoral,” and “felt that Newark was a place that had suffered a great, historical fall,” said Blake Bailey, who is writing an authorized biography of Mr. Roth. With his bequests to the Newark Public Library, “Philip wanted to do his part to bring Newark back. This was the single most significant gesture he could make.” . . .

The grandchild of immigrants who fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe, Mr. Roth in his books painted an idyllic—and sometimes comic—picture of Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood, where he grew up, as a bustling, tightknit enclave of lower-middle-class but upwardly mobile Jews. . . .

“He had left Newark, but in some ways he never left Newark,” said the writer Judith Thurman, a member of Mr. Roth’s literary circle of friends. “It was home to his imagination.”