The most beautiful word in the English language

It is, says the American writer Philip Roth, indignation. It was also the title of his 29th book, which was published last year. Roth's 30th novel, The Humbling, has just appeared. It's about "an aging stage actor whose empty life is changed by unusual erotic desire." Nemesis, Roth's 31st novel, set in the summer of 1944 during a polio epidemic in New Jersey, will be in the bookshops next year.

Quality or quantity? That's the question often asked about those remarkable artists who never seem to stop creating. You can't have both, some people say, but in the case of Philip Roth we've been getting quality and quantity for 40 years now. He's a great writer and, like all the greats, he creates characters we care about. In his 2006 novel, Everyman, Roth takes us into the mind of a nine-year-old boy who is about to have a hernia operation. Imagine what a child must feel like in that situation! Roth uses the moment to make fun of one of the biggest phobias of boys and men — emasculation:

"Dr. Smith was wearing a surgical gown and a white mask that changed everything about him — he might not even have been Dr. Smith. He could have been someone else entirely, someone who had not grown up the son of poor immigrants named Smulowitz, someone his father knew nothing about, someone nobody knew, someone who had just wandered into the operating room and picked up a knife. In that moment of terror when they lowered the ether mask over his face as though to smother him, he could have sworn that the surgeon, whoever he was, had whispered, 'Now I'm going to turn you into a girl.'"

Philip Roth was 36 when he became famous. The year was 1969, and he let the world listen to Alexander Portnoy talking to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel, about his unhappiness with his sex life. Portnoy's Complaint was the perfect book for the sexual liberation era.

In a different era, right between the death of Chaucer and the birth of Shakespeare, a drama by an anonymous playwright appeared in England. It was called Everyman and it contained one of the greatest lines in English writing: "Oh, Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind." Philip Roth writes mainly about dying now, but I hope that he'll get the Nobel Prize he richly deserves before Death comes for him.