Book description
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A.
Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide inthe1940
presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America.
Not only had Lindbergh publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America
towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as
the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial
'understanding' with Adolf Hitler.
What then followed in America is the historical setting for this
startling new novel by Pulitzer-prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts
what it was like for his Newark family during the menacing years of
the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be
Jews had every reason to expect the worst.
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.
