Eddie Roth came to fiction writing later in life. He received an M.A. in English at age 64 from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2023, where he won The Mimi Zanger Memorial Award in Fiction and William Carlin Slattery Memorial Award in Poetry or Drama.

He organized The Eddie Roth Reader in the summer of 2024 to share his writing with friends and interested acquaintances. He sees the Reader mainly as a platform for his short fiction. But it presents other forms, including a few of his old newspaper editorials and columns, an old speech, as well as occasional poetry, essays, and fragments.

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Eddie was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in the suburbs (Webster Groves) of St. Louis. His mother, Elsie Shemin Roth, was a registered nurse and was active in humanitarian causes. His father, Jack L. Roth, Jr., was an investment advisor. 

Eddie graduated from New York University (1979) and Fordham Law School (1982). He spent most of his working career practicing law, first in New York and then returning to St. Louis.

​​Eddie clerked for Chief Judge Lawrence H. Cooke of the New York Court of Appeals (1982-1984), and was a litigation associate at the New York City firm of Debevoise & Plimpton (1985-1987). He engaged in  private law practice with firms in St. Louis for nearly 20 years (1987-2001, 2017-2021) during which he also served on the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners (1998-2001), including as its president. He spent nearly ten years (2002-2011)working as a newspaper editorial writer at the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  He spent another six years (2011-2017) in St. Louis municipal government in the administration of Francis G. Slay, the city's longest serving mayor, as Director of Operations, Director of Public Safety and Director of Human Services. Most recently, Eddie worked in police section of the city's law department as an assistant city counselor (2021-2025). He retired in October 2025.

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Eddie has been married to Jeanne Philips-Roth, a legal aid lawyer, for more than 35 years. They live in a brick and stucco bungalow house in south St. Louis. They have three wonderful daughters, Emily, Julia and Alice.

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ARTIFICIAL (but) INTELLIGENT PRAISE for eddierothreader.com

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Eddie Roth’s writing occupies a space increasingly rare in contemporary literature: it is serious without being solemn, personal without being confessional, and reflective without drifting into abstraction. Across his fiction, essays, and editorials, Roth demonstrates a sustained commitment to accuracy—of memory, of language, and of moral implication.

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What distinguishes this body of work is not stylistic bravura but restraint. Roth’s sentences do not announce themselves; they do their work quietly. Scenes are built from specific places and social arrangements—clubs, courts, neighborhoods, workplaces—rendered with the familiarity of someone who has moved through them for decades. This groundedness gives the work authority. Nothing feels imagined from afar.

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Memory, for Roth, is not a sentimental resource but an ethical one. The past is revisited with caution and humility, often to expose misunderstanding rather than resolve it. Fathers and sons, civic leaders and bystanders, neighbors and colleagues appear not as types but as individuals shaped by partial knowledge and unspoken rules. Roth resists both condemnation and absolution, allowing moral complexity to remain intact.

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The cumulative effect is of a writer engaged in a long inquiry rather than a series of isolated performances. The work assumes a patient reader—one willing to attend to small shifts in tone, implication, and silence. In return, it offers something increasingly scarce: writing that trusts reflection more than urgency and accuracy more than effect.

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Eddie Roth may not court attention, but his work earns it. Taken together, these pieces form a quiet, coherent examination of how lives are lived inside institutions, memories, and stories—and how writing can serve not as display, but as record.​

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Claude.ai:

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Roth’s fiction makes a sustained argument for the value of attention—attention to place, to the specificities of people’s lives and work, to what persists and what disappears. In an era of fiction often characterized by pyrotechnic prose styles or high-concept premises, Roth’s quieter approach can seem almost counter-cultural. His stories insist that ordinary life, carefully rendered, reveals sufficient complexity and strangeness to warrant serious artistic treatment.

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This is not to claim Roth’s work is perfect or without limitations. Some readers may find the prose too measured, the pacing too deliberate. The stories rarely provide the satisfactions of plot resolution; they tend to end on notes of sustained uncertainty rather than closure. The fictional world they inhabit—Port De Lys and its surrounding areas—is somewhat narrow in its social range, populated largely by educated professionals and rural working people, with less attention to economic precarity or more extreme forms of marginalization.

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But within the territory Roth has claimed, he works with remarkable integrity and skill. His stories trust their materials—ordinary grief, small-town social dynamics, the textures of remembered places—to yield meaning without forcing it. They demonstrate that fiction need not be sensational to be significant, that moral inquiry can proceed without moralizing, that careful description can be a form of ethical practice.

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The Eddie Roth Reader, assembled in 2024 after Roth completed his M.A. in English at age 64, represents a late-career flourishing—the work of someone who came to fiction with accumulated experience of law, journalism, and public service. This background shows in the stories’ attention to institutional life, their comfort with civic and professional worlds, their understanding of how communities actually function. But it also shows in their humility, their resistance to grandiosity, their willingness to document rather than to theorize.

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Taken together, these stories form a coherent and increasingly impressive body of work. They deserve attention from readers interested in contemporary realism, in fiction of place, in stories that take seriously the moral lives of ordinary people. Eddie Roth may not court literary celebrity, but his work earns respect through its patient accumulation of carefully observed detail, its moral seriousness without sanctimony, and its quiet insistence that the world we actually inhabit—with its losses and uncertainties and small persistent kindnesses—is worthy of art.

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