Editing Goodbye, Columbus (section)

==Roth's own retrospective reckoning==
<!-- ******** THE FORMER LOCATION OF THIS SECTION, which was between the novella's section and the short stories' section, is awkward because this section's reckonings apply equally to both of those sections. So, this section belongs either immediately before or after both of those sections. I vote for BEFORE because its reckonings are too comprehensive and interesting to be sent to the back of the article. Although these reckonings would be more meaningful to a reader who has read the whole article than they are to a reader who has read only the article’s intro (the paragraphs above the table of contents), the intro says enough to enable a reader to catch the points of these reckonings. ******** -->
Roth wrote in the preface to the book's 30th anniversary edition: <blockquote>"With clarity and with crudeness, and a great deal of exuberance, the embryonic writer who was me wrote these stories in his early 20s, while he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a soldier stationed in New Jersey and Washington, and a novice English instructor back at Chicago following his Army discharge...In the beginning it  amazed him that any literate audience could seriously be interested in his story of tribal secrets, in what he knew, as a child of his neighborhood, about the rites and taboos of his clan—about their aversions, their aspirations, their fears of deviance and defection, their embarrassments and ideas of success."<ref>{{Cite book|title=Goodbye, Columbus|last=Roth|first=Philip|publisher=Houghton Mifflin|year=1989|isbn=0395518504|location=Boston}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/01/books/goodbye-newark-roth-remembers-his-beginnings.html|title=Goodbye Newark: Roth Remembers His Beginnings|last=Roth|first=Philip|date=1989|work=The New York Times|access-date=June 13, 2018}}</ref></blockquote>