Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus , cemented it with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint, and has continued to write critically acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels began with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and include the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral .