Editing Nathan Zuckerman (section)

==Analysis==
By creating parallels between Zuckerman's life as a novelist (with the novel ''Carnovsky'' a stand-in for his ''[[Portnoy's Complaint]]'') and his own, Roth expressed his interest in the relationship between an author and his work. Roth mined such [[meta-fiction]]al concerns more deeply in his series of novels published in the 1980s, most radically in ''[[The Counterlife]]'' and ''[[Operation Shylock]]''.

By the mid-1990s, though, Roth tamped down on the self-referentiality. He reintroduced Zuckerman as witness and narrator in a trilogy of historical novels: ''[[American Pastoral]]'' (1997), ''[[I Married a Communist]]'' (1998), and ''[[The Human Stain]]'' (2000), set in the period from the 1960s into the 1990s. The [[British Indian]] author [[Salman Rushdie]] used Zuckerman as a character in his novel ''[[The Ground Beneath Her Feet]]'' (1999), where in an alternate universe, it is the literary alter-egos (and their novels) that are real.<ref>Patterson, Troy. [https://archive.today/20120729155951/http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,273071,00.html "Book Review: The Ground Beneath Her Feet"], EW, 16 April 1999</ref>