Philip Roth: âNo one can accuse him of ever hiding who he was.â Photograph: Reuters/Alamy Philip Roth: âNo one can accuse him of ever hiding who he was.â Photograph: Reuters/Alamy Sat 3 Apr 2021 04.00 EDT Last modified on Mon 5 Apr 2021 06.55 EDT In order to grow up, as Sigmund Freud probably wrote somewhere, a child must rebel against its parents, and for a while now modern culture has been rebelling against its literary fathers, that Mount Rushmore of 20th-century highbrow masculinity: Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth. Last month, twoBritish newspapers announced that Roth âcould face getting cancelledâ on account of details about his personal life included in two new biographies. That Roth arguably cancelled himself three years ago by dying is beside the point: the quickest way to prove one is Good these days is to vilify those who are Bad, and death is no hiding place.