(born 1933) Jewish American novelist, whose novels have focused primarily on the experiences of being a person who has grown up middle class, male and Jewish in the early 1950s. His first publication was the novella and short stories Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Ten years later he published his most notorious work, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), which found the central character seeking relief from insecurity through masturbation and sex with shiksas. The series of Zuckerman novels followed (My Life as a Man, The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson and The Counterlife).