Roth's first work, Goodbye, Columbus, featured his irreverent humor of the life of middle-class Jewish Americans, and was met by controversy among reviewers, who were highly polarized in their judgments one reviewer criticized it as infused with a sense of self-loathing. In response, Roth, in his 1963 essay "Writing About Jews" (collected in Reading Myself and Others), maintained that he wanted to explore the conflict between the call to Jewish solidarity and his desire to be free to question the values and morals of middle-class Jewish Americans uncertain of their identities in an era of cultural assimilation and upward social mobility: