The author concentrates on five episodes from his life : his protected childhood during the thirties and forties in Jewish Newark ; his education in the early fifties at gentile Bucknell ; his passionate entanglement as a young university instructor with the angriest person he'd ever met - the "girl of my dreams," Roth calls her ; his clash with a Jewish establishment outraged by the "self-hatred" of Goodbye, Columbus ; and last, his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of the manic side to his own talent that led him to write Portnoy's Complaint."--Inside jacket flap.