WARREN, Conn. (AP) – “Hello!” “Hello!” “Hello!”

Philip Roth calls out to the visitors he awaits in his garden on this warm, beautifully dry afternoon. He is wearing slacks and a blueish-green work shirt, reclining under the screened confines of a spacious and tentlike contraption known as a bug house.

What a picture this is. He could be a head of state at his summer retreat. Roth invites his guests inside the tent and offers lemonade. His smile is bright and playful, as if to say, “So, did you imagine you’d see Roth sitting under something like this? Will you write about me or will you write about the bug house?”

Bug houses are fascinating, no doubt, but let us write about Roth.

The author of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “American Pastoral” and many other novels has lived more than 30 years in the Connecticut countryside in an 18th-century farmhouse, where the late summer air is deep and calm, disturbed only by crickets and the occasional passing car.

At times, he could have used a house that screens out more than bugs. Over the past half century, he has been accused of anti-Semitism and obscenity; found himself relentlessly, and unfavorably, compared to the characters in his books; survived heart surgery and a nervous breakdown; endured two contentious marriages, the latter to actress Claire Bloom.

But his mood is light today and the news of late has been welcome: Roth is the youngest living author to be given solo billing in the Library of America, which issues hardcover collections of the country’s most acclaimed writers. The first two volumes, covering his work through the early 1970s, are out this fall.

“He is a great artist,” says critic Harold Bloom. “He may be the finest artist among American writers since William Faulkner and Henry James. There’s the endless variety of modes he works in. His style, his stance, his point of view.”

In the best sense, the Library of America project is like witnessing one’s own memorial. The library’s books are traditionally dedicated to dead writers or to those no longer active, such as Eudora Welty and Roth’s close friend, Saul Bellow, who died last spring.

Now, with Roth a lively 72, tall and straight-backed with dark, daring eyes, his work has been slipped inside shiny black jackets, stacked on shelves along with the works of Bellow, Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

“It’s an admission of the books into perpetuity,” Roth says.

Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, N.J., a time and place he has remembered lovingly in “The Facts,” “American Pastoral” and other works. The son of an insurance salesman, Roth has described his childhood as “intensely secure and protected.” He was, he later wrote, a “good, responsible boy,” but also “strong-minded and independent.”

His debut book, published in 1959, was “Goodbye, Columbus,” a novella and five short stories. It brought the writer a National Book Award and some extra-literary criticism.

The title piece was a love (and lust) story about a working-class Jew and the wealthy girl he romances. The aunt of the main character, Neil Klugman, is a meddling worrywart, and the affluent relatives of Neil’s girlfriend are satirized as shallow materialists.

Some Jews saw Roth as a traitor, subjecting his brethren to ridicule before the gentile world.

“It seemed pretty reckless and vicious,” Roth says, adding that the book was also praised by such Jewish authors and critics as Bellow, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin. “I was just trying to depict the way it was, the way it sounded, what they talked about. This was just what I observed or imagined.”

Roth calls his early books “apprentice” works and likens the process to a shoemaker learning his craft. The terse, but humorous “Goodbye, Columbus” was followed by “Letting Go,” a long novel about marriage and academic life. Five years later, in 1967, he released the most uncharacteristic work of his career, “When She Was Good,” an earnest story set in the Midwest.

To explain what happened with the next book, “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Roth cites a scene from “Crime and Punishment” in which the lecherous Svidrigailov traps the lovely Dunya in his apartment, only to discover she has a gun.

“This,” says Svidrigailov, “changes everything.”

As did “Portnoy’s Complaint” for Roth.

“And I pulled the pistol,” he sighs.

To read “Portnoy’s Complaint” after “When She Was Good” is like watching a well-behaved dinner guest suddenly pound the table, leap from his chair and scream that he can’t take it any more. Published in 1969, a great year for rebellion, “Portnoy’s Complaint” was an event, a birth, a summation, Roth’s triumph over what he has called “the awesome graduate school authority of Henry James,” as if history’s lid had blown open and out erupted a generation’s worth of Jewish guilt and desire.

At last, Roth was writing with the charge of Wolfe and of Bellow in his own breakthrough book, “The Adventures of Augie March.” Roth’s novel satirized the dull expectations laid upon “nice Jewish boys” and immortalized the most ribald manifestations of sexual obsession, forever changing the way readers thought of liver and cored apples.

He is less controversial now, perhaps less famous. But over the past decade, he has been honored as simply a writer, from the fury of “Mickey Sabbath,” winner of the National Book Award, to the elegiac “American Pastoral,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Last year’s “The Plot Against America” was his most popular novel in a long time and its story, the anti-Semitic presidency of Charles Lindbergh, was proof that his imagination was active as ever.

“I think at this moment, in the absence of Bellow, that Roth is the most courageous American writer,” says author and critic Cynthia Ozick. “There’s nothing he’s afraid to say.”

He is ever alert to time and mortality, worrying about “the long haul” and looking in wonder at those who keep at it into old age. He admires historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., still at work in his late 80s. And he remembers Bellow, who completed his last novel, “Ravelstein,” when he was 86.

“”Ravelstein’ was not my favorite book, although it has some beautiful portraits. … But the fact that he was 86 when he wrote it, which is incredible. To get up every morning and work? And think? And remember the words?”‘ Roth says, eyes wide with amazement.

“The long haul kind of wearies me, the thought of doing a book for two or three or years; and you have to rule so much else out of your life. I always knew that literature satisfied a taste for considering life in a certain way, but that it wasn’t a guide to living.”

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