A "literary giant"! He might have been a good novelist, with a shocking and funny style. Howver, a good novelist is also judged by his/her integrity and principles as well by as his/her relationship to power and justice. Like Harper Lee, Roth accepted a medal from Obama, a criminal, an imeprialist and who, with others, laid the conditions which spawned Trump.
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51