The second novel of Roth’s eloquent American trilogy, set in the tempestuous McCarthy era - a brilliant successor to American Pastoral
I Married a Communist charts the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, an American roughneck who begins life as a ditchdigger in 1930s New Jersey, becoming a big-time radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star - and as a zealous, bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes - Ira marries Hollywood's beloved leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling expose that identifies Ira as 'an American taking his orders from Moscow'.
In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and savage revenge, anti-Communist fever pollutes national politics and infects the relationships of ordinary Americans; friends become deadly enemies, parents and children tragically estranged, lovers blacklisted and felled from vertiginous heights.
About the Author
In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004". Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. He died in 2018.
Industry Reviews
"A passionate and coruscating American tragedy." - Financial Times
"Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity." - Mail on Sunday
"Quintessential Philip Roth." - Sunday Telegraph
"A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology." - Observer
"Roth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit... a gripping novel." - New York Times Book Review
"Despite its superb re-creation of the conflicted 1940s and the ordeal of the American Left, along with a plethora of sharply realized ideologues at verbal war, this very talky book is an example of Roth at his most forceful and eloquent..." - Kirkus Reviews
"Roth has done something more wicked than ever before: he has dared to write a wrenching, compaionate, intelligent novel about the life of a good man." - Boston Globe
"One of Mr. Roth's most powerful novels ever, a big, rough-hewn work built on a grand design... A fiercely affecting work of art." - The New York Times
"American Pastoral deconstructed the radical hysteria of the late 1960s... [I Married a Communist] deconstructs the reactionary hysteria of the early 1950s... Mr. Roth has the frantic politics of this frantic time in exact pitch... I Married a Communist is a remarkable work - remarkable in its stringent observation of American life, remarkable in its poignant sense of the contradictions and pathos of human existence, remarkable in its style and in its wisdom." - Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., New York Observer
"Never before has Roth written fiction with such clear conviction." - Time Magazine
"Roth is still at the top of his game... one heavy hitter who's playing for keeps." - Newsweek
