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The American psyche is channelled into the gripping story of one man. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth at his very best.
It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished 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 that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth's brilliant trilogy of post-war America – a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.
"This is a fitting capstone to the trilogy that includes American Pastoral and I Married a Communist — a book more balanced and humane than either, and bound, because of its explosive theme, to be widely discussed." —Publishers Weekly
"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." —Booklist
"A strong successor to the earlier two books; recommended for most fiction collections." —Library Journal
"At 67, Roth has not lost one ampere of his power to rile and surprise." —Time Magazine
"The Human Stain exposes the stress that race and ethnicity, economics, puritanism and paranoia have placed on the American Dream." —Elle
"The Human Stain is an astonishing, uneven and often very beautiful book." —The New York Times Book Review, Lorrie Moore
This information about The Human Stain was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. He attended Rutgers University before receiving his B.A. at Bucknell and his M.A. from the University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1956. He taught English at a number of universities including the University of Pennsylvania where he was writer-in-residence for fifteen years. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, was published in 1959 and won the National Book Award for fiction. Patrimony (1991) was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Operation Shylock (1993) of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Sabbath's Theater (1995) of the National Book Award. American Pastoral was his twentieth book. In 2005, he became the third living American writer to have his work published in a ...
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