Book description
In this mesmerizing, funny, chilling novel. the setting is a small
town in the 1940s Midwest, the subject the heart of a wounded and
ferociously moralistic young woman.
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, 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.
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.
