NEWARK — Roberta Harrington, a retired nurse of the same vintage as Philip Roth, remembers a visit a year ago by Mr. Roth to his clapboard boyhood home, which she now lives in, on Summit Avenue. He recalled with pleasure the many times that as a child “he’d run up the stairs and come back down again” just for the fun of it and how he prized a cherry tree that was no longer there.

That house, that quiet tree-lined street, that neighborhood, this treasured city was the setting of many of Mr. Roth’s novels just as William Faulkner set many of his stories in the region around his hometown, Oxford, Miss. Though Faulkner used the fictional name Yoknapatawpha County, Mr. Roth, who died Tuesday at 85, rarely bothered to camouflage Newark in any way.

In his breakthrough debut novella, “Goodbye, Columbus,” his alter ego Neil Klugman, working at the Newark Public Library for a summer, is bewitched by the fetching and much better-heeled Brenda Patimkin. In “American Pastoral,” another Roth stand-in, Nathan Zuckerman, idolizes Swede Levov, the star athlete of Weequahic High School, a character based on the school’s real-life star athlete when Mr. Roth attended in the 1940s. His last novel, “Nemesis,” recalls the panic that enveloped his tightly knit Jewish neighborhood in 1944 when a polio epidemic maimed and paralyzed some of its children.