The Dying Animal.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001. First edition of Roth's third book in a series portraying the life of the fictional professor David Kapesh, preceded by The Breast (1971) and The Professor of Desire (1977). Octavo, original half cloth. Boldly signed by Philip Roth on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you?re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college?as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete?s critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated. "No one can come close to Roth’s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative" (The Boston Globe). Basis for the film Elegy, starring Penelope Cruz, Ben Kingsley, and Dennis Hopper, and co-stars Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard in supporting roles.