Book description
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 ageing 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 ruth about Silk would astonish even his most
virulent accuser.
Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years
from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends,
including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles
upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography
of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all
his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came
unravelled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private
history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal,
'magnificently' interwoven with 'the larger public history of modern America'.
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.
