Book description
Gill Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the
umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, 'The Babe Ruth of the Big
House', who never hit a home run sober. If you've never heard of them
- or of the Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless big-league ball team in
American history - it's because of the Communist plot, and the
capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from
baseball memory.
In this ribald, richly imagined, and wickedly satiric novel, Philip
Roth turns baseball's status as national pastime and myth into an
occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete with heroism and
perfidy, ebullient wordplay and a cast of characters that includes the
House Un-American Activities Committee.
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.
