An editor, as described by Joan Didion and Robert Gottlieb, plays a crucial yet ambiguous role in helping writers shape their ideas and achieve their goals.

Philip Roth, known as the most secular of the late 20th-century American literary giants alongside Updike and Bellow, initially showed little interest in metaphysical or transcendental questions in his works which focused on psychological realism.

The text discusses the author's upbringing in a wealthy, secular California community with little connection to Jewish identity, but a strong attraction to Jewish literature featuring characters grappling with Jewishness.