When She Was Good
A Novel
Philip Roth
From “a giant of American literature” (The Atlantic), a funny and chilling novel, set in a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and its subject is the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness" is a terrible disease.
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Philip Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.
“High, careful tragedy, nasty as life, and Roth emerges…as a Dreiser who can write!” —Stanley Elkin
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.