11:1 Spring 1957

PHILIP ROTH

Positive Thinking on Pennsylvania Avenue

Philip Roth’s first publication outside of the Bucknell College literary magazine was a story called “The Day It Snowed”; it appeared in the Fall 1954 issue of Chicago Review. Roth later told Molly McQuade, “It’s a story by someone who’s twenty years old. That’s all you can really say about it.”* Roth had more to say to us about this brief essay, which appeared in the Spring 1957 issue:

The Eisenhower piece was my second publication in the Chicago Review. My friend George Starbuck, the poet, was an editor at the review, and it was only natural to give the piece to George. I was 23, at the U. of C. as an instructor in the college and a part-time graduate student. A few weeks after the piece appeared, it was reprinted in the New Republic. That led to my doing movie and TV reviews on and off for the New Republic for the next couple of years.

[DN, 1996]

*Molly McQuade, ed., An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 125.

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