Book Details

For the last half century, the novels of Philip Roth have re-energized American fiction and redefined its possibilities. Roth’s comic genius, his imaginative daring, his courage in exploring uncomfortable truths, and his assault on political, cultural, and sexual orthodoxies have made him one of the essential writers of our time. By special arrangement with the author, The Library of America continues the definitive edition of Roth’s collected works.

The tragic hero of American Pastoral (1997) is Seymour “Swede” Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory—who comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country goes to war in Vietnam, and the family of this strong, confident master of social equilibrium is overwhelmed by the forces of disorder unleashed by the turbulent 1960s.

I Married a Communist (1998) is set in America’s anti-Communist 1940s. Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. A self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in World War II a clandestine and formidable Communist. His passionate commitment to Marxist revolution in America will lead him to ruin in the era of the blacklist.

The Human Stain (2000) concludes Roth’s singular trilogy of postwar American lives that are harshly determined both by the nation’s fate and the “stain” that ineradicably marks human nature. The time is 1998, the year of the presidential impeachment; the location is a small New England town, where an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues declare him a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would astonish his most virulent accuser—a hidden private history that Roth deftly interweaves with the sanctimonious moral climate of Silk’s American moment.

Ross Miller, volume editor, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut and has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and Trinity College. He is the author of American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago and Here’s the Deal: The Buying and Selling of a Great American City.

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