PBS' PHILIP ROTH w Livia Manera, Claudia Roth Pierpont

PBS' American Masters series presents Philip Roth: Unmasked, the first film biography of the acclaimed novelist in honor of his 80th birthday.

The film explores the life and career of the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novelist Philip Roth, often referred to as the greatest living American writer.

Roth for the first time allowed a journalist to spend 10 days interviewing him on camera at his homes in NYC and Conn. The result is a 90-minute documentary with Roth freely discussing intimate aspects of his life and art as never before, including his unliterary upbringing in Newark, writing process, his psychoanalysis, and the inspiration behind his most famous characters -- Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh, Alexander Portnoy, and Mickey Sabbath -- and historical novels.

The film premieres Friday, March 29 on PBS.

Film Co-writer/Co-director Livia Manera is an Italian literary journalist specializing in Anglo-American literature. She has interviewed major British and American authors including John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan, Richard Ford, Nicole Krauss, and Philip Roth.

Roth commentator Claudia Roth Pierpont has written for The New Yorker since 1990 on subjects ranging from the Ballets Russes to the Chrysler Building, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche to that of Mae West.

A collection of eleven of Pierpont’s New Yorker essays, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, published in 2000, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Pierpont has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the NY Public Library.