The Human Stain
A Novel
Philip Roth
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE KORET JEWISH BOOK AWARD
One of the New York Times Best Books of the Century
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
The third book in the brilliant American Trilogy of postwar American lives—Nathan Zuckerman recounts the life a classics professor at a small New England college whose personal history mirrors "the larger public history of modern America" (Wall Street Journal ).
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser.
Coleman Silk has a secret. Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unraveled.
By turns unnerving, hilarious, and sad…. It is a book that shows how the public zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual’s life…. Not only a philosophic bookend to American Pastoral but a large and stirring book as well.” —New York Times Book Review
“A master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment." —The Wall Street Journal
“In American literature today, there’s Philip Roth, and then there’s everybody else.” —Chicago Tribune
“Philip Roth’s The Human Stain is the best novel he has written—not to devalue the past. Here, everything the writer has learnt and experienced within that indefinable form we call the novel, the impact of society on himself and the people around him, world contemporary mores, beliefs, prejudices, have come to full realization.” —Nadine Gordimer, The Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
Philip Roth (1933–2018) was one of the most prolific and provocative American novelists of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey, the city that anchors much of his fiction, he made his debut with Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960. He went on to publish more than thirty books, among them Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. His recurring alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh, allowed him to probe Jewish American identity, desire, mortality, and the pressures of history with relentless candor. Roth received the National Jewish Book Award three times, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the Man Booker International Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. He retired from writing in 2012 and died in New York in 2018.