Philip Roth’s idyllic Connecticut escape is now on the market for $2.925 million, reports the Wall Street Journal. The 150-acre property is located in the town of Warren, in Litchfield County, an approximately two-hour drive from New York City, and comprises a three-bedroom clapboard house built in 1790, a barn, an in-ground swimming pool, a two-room writing studio, and a grand expanse of pastures, woods, and ponds.
Roth biographer Blake Bailey told WSJ that the famous American writer (who died in 2018 at the age of 85) “became very attached to quiet, rural surroundings” and found Connecticut a particularly ideal spot to pen his many acclaimed novels. He bought the home in 1972 for $110,000 in cash, according to Bailey, and slowly bought up the adjoining properties over the years as a way to protect his privacy and solitude. It was at his rural home where Roth wrote the three books that would come to be known as the American Trilogy: American Pastoral, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, The Human Stain, and I Married a Communist. Though he also had a place in New York City, Roth considered the Connecticut estate his primary home between the years of 1996 and 2001; at times he lived mostly in the property's studio in order to get more writing done.
In a 2011 interview with Roth, Slate describes his writing studio as a “small wooden cabin” with a broad desk set before a large fireplace, with views of apple trees, the barn, and a 200-year-old ash tree just beyond the windows.
Presently, his extensive book collection remains at the home in a room that he converted into a library, with metal shelving in the middle. The estate will be sold sans furniture and personal affects, however. Many of his personal items, including typewriters, were sold at auction in July, and his books will be donated to the Newark Public Library in the coming months. Earlier this year, Roth’s residence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was also put up for sale, for $3.2 million. The apartment consists of two separate units that he combined into one in 2004 following his split from then-wife Claire Bloom—both were sold together for a total of $3.6 million. Roth also owned a unit below that apartment that he’d bought and rented out as a way to maintain peace and quiet for his writing; the tenants who had been living there bought the unit for $1.55 million this past June.
