NEW YORK, May 23 — Prolific novelist Philip Roth, a dominant force in American literature throughout the latter half of the 20th century, has died, US media said late yesterday. He was 85.

The New Yorker magazine first reported the death of Roth, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his acclaimed novel American Pastoral.

The New York Times, citing a close friend, confirmed the death of the writer, who lived in New York and Connecticut.

A prolific essayist and critic, Roth was best known for mining the Jewish-American experience in his work.

His titanic stature on the post-World War II literary scene came from the universality of his message — in his own words: "I don’t write Jewish, I write American.”

He long managed to sustain his literary output both in terms of quality as well as quantity, as exemplified by his widely admired political trilogy that included American Pastoral as well as I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).

The decorated author won most top literary honors but the coveted Nobel Literature Prize eluded him.

The Swedish Academy announced earlier this month there will be no Nobel Literature Prize this year in the wake of a crisis stemming from the anti-sexual harassment #MeToo campaign.

Philip Milton Roth was born on March 19, 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, the grandson of European Jews who were part of the 19th-century wave of immigration to the United States. — AFP