NEW YORK -- In this city of smash Broadway hits, Philip Roth's birthday party was the toughest ticket in town.

Crowds were turned away April 11 at Miller Theater on the Columbia University campus for the afternoon bash. Inside the hall, the atmosphere was so laudatory it verged on a wake rather than a tribute to the writer who's very much alive at 75.

"I was glad to be reminded that this was not a funeral," Roth remarked in his short closing remarks. "I was beginning to have my doubts."

Nary a discouraging word was heard during the two-hour symposium organized by the Library of America, which has collected most of Roth's work in handsome editions, the National Book Foundation, which honored him in 2002 for his "distinguished contribution to American letters," and Columbia's American Studies Program.

"Seventy-five. How sudden," Roth joked in acknowledging the tribute. "Time runs out at a terrifying speed."

He turned back the clock to 1943, the middle of World War II in Newark, N.J., when, as a 10-year-old, he tapped out adventure stories on his mother's Underwood typewriter.

"Beneath the title I didn't type my name, however. Philip Roth wasn't a writer's name. I typed instead, 'By Eric Duncan.' That was the sturdy name I chose."

His point was that, at age 10, Roth was aware of his country's intolerance even as it sold the war to Americans as a fight against it. America's "pop oratorio" of the times was "The House I Live In," a plea for racial harmony recorded by Frank Sinatra.

Roth said his writing talents were called upon in eighth grade three years later to co-author the class play, "an allegory called 'Let Freedom Ring.' " He "sinisterly" played the villain, Prejudice, who was vanquished at the finale as the cast sang the Sinatra hit.

"Exiting stage right, the loathsome Prejudice skulked off in defeat. It was the end of Prejudice in America," he said to laughter. "So we thought."

The occasion marked the beginning of Roth's concerns with the persistence of intolerance. "It was the start of the trail leading up to today," he said. "The 12-year-old boy who co-authored 'Let Freedom Ring' was father to the man who wrote "The Plot Against America.' "

That 2004 novel, a blend of fiction and history, fantasized about an anti-Semitic America siding with Nazi Germany in the 1940s.

Roth will continue the theme in his novel, "Indignation," to be published by Houghton Mifflin in September. The scene is Winesburg, Ohio (created initially by Sherwood Anderson), the time is 1951, and the hero is a young Jewish fellow from, where else?, Newark.

It will be his 29th since "Goodbye, Columbus" in 1959.

The first segment of the tribute presented a trio of younger American novelists -- Jonathan Lethem, 44; Nathan Englander, 37; and Charles D'Ambrosio, coy about his age, but somewhere in the 40s.

All discovered Roth in their teens through his "adults-only" titles, "Portnoy's Complaint" and "The Breast," books that appealed to the sexual curiosity of the late-adolescent male.

They reported finding the forbidden fruits in out-of-the-way places in their parents' houses and surreptitiously reading them.

Roth's most scandalous book was well-known in his Orthodox Jewish home, said Englander. "I spent a lot of time in my bedroom and when it was time to eat, my mother would yell, 'Hey, Portnoy, it's dinnertime.' "

Later in adulthood, all three said, they were drawn to "The Ghost Writer," Roth's 1979 novella in which he introduces Nathan Zuckerman, the novelist's alter ego.

Zuckerman is the narrator of his latest, "Exit Ghost," now aging and impotent, yet still angry and outrageous.

"It is a kind of guide to the writing life," said D'Ambrosio.

Lethem, however, cited "The Counterlife," written in 1986 and perhaps Roth's most difficult and frustrating work of fiction, again with Zuckerman at the center.

"Roth's books are always a high-wire act," Lethem said.

Asked to discuss the novelist's lustful male characters, all three took the high ground with Roth sitting just 10 feet away in the audience.

"He presents the whole configuration of being a man," commented D'Ambrosio, while Lethem wriggled a bit with, "Roth is honest about his nakedness [in his books] because he flexes both his manhood and his vulnerability."

The program's second half was also a Rothian lovefest, but with an awkwardness and distance expressed by the largely academic panel led by Joel Conarroe, former dean of arts and sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and ex-president of the PEN American Center.

The participants were Hermione Lee, a Roth scholar at Oxford University; Ross Miller, University of Connecticut professor and Roth biographer; Benjamin Taylor, fiction writer and editor of Saul Bellow's letters; and Claudia Roth Pierpont, a New Yorker magazine writer.

All were asked to select their favorite novel, and, again, the titles centered on "The Ghost Writer" and "The Counterlife," with a plug for "Sabbath's Theater."

Despite the almost tremulous adoration heard in Lee's voice, the endorsements lacked the spontaneity and insight of the novelists.

Lee, biographer of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, called Roth "a living literary legend" and introduced him with "love and gratitude, admiration and pleasure."

It was that kind of day. No wonder the novelist felt ready for the embalmer.

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