Philip Roth’s brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America - a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a Communist
It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town a distinguished classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser.
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who comes upon Silk's secret, and sets out to unearth his former buried life, piecing the biographical fragments back together. This is against backdrop of seismic shifts in American history, which take on real, human urgency as Zuckerman discovers more and more about Silk's past and his futile search for renewal and regeneration.
Set in 1990s America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of post-war, American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the 'human stain' that so ineradicably marks human nature.
About the Author
Philip Roth (1933-2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. 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, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He 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’.
Industry Reviews
"An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand." - Sunday Telegraph
"The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America." - Sunday Times
"A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece." - Mail on Sunday
"One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand." - Sunday Telegraph
"One of the most beautiful books I've ever read." - Red
"The Human Stain provides one of the most provocative explorations of race and rage in American literature." - Christian Science Monitor
"Mr. Roth does a beautifully nuanced job... by turns, unnerving, hilarious and sad." - The New York Times
"With... The Human Stain, Philip Roth, the great autobiographer, has transformed himself into Philip Roth, the great social novelist." - The Chicago Tribune
"At 67, Roth has not lost one ampere of his power to rile and surprise." - Time Magazine
"A strong successor to the earlier two books; recommended for most fiction collections." - Library Journal
"...this novel... eloquently makes its case for the transcendent complexity of the human soul." - The Miami Herald
"To be human, Roth tells us in this roiling, sometimes persuasive novel, is to make our dirty mark." - Newsday
"The Human Stain exposes the stress that... race and ethnicity, economics, puritanism and paranoia... have placed on the American Dream."
- Elle
"A marvel of imaginative empathy, generosity, and tact. Roth's late maturity looks more and more like his golden age." - Kirkus Reviews
"As Roth unfurls his hero's galvanizing tale, he protests the tyranny of prejudice and propriety, recognizes the "terrifyingly provisional nature of everything," and shakes his head in sorrow and wonder over the"inevitably stained creatures that we are." - Donna Seaman, Booklist
