Book description
It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious,
law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner
is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus
of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he here and not at a local
college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father,
the sturdy, hardworking neighbourhood butcher seems to have gone mad -
mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the
dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in the every corner for his
beloved boy. So Marcus leaves and, far from home, has to find his way
amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.
Indignation is the story of a young man's education in life's
terrifying chances and bizarre obstructions. It is a story of
inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery,
courage and error, told with all the inventive energy and with Roth
has at his command.
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, previously awarded to
John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. 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 'for a body of work...of enduring originality
and consummate craftmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for
achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of
achievement over a sustained career...places him or her in the highest
rank of American literature.'
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published
in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The
last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
