Book description
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s; a
budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the
contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight
guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his literary idol, E.
I. Lonoff.
At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of
indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student
of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with
his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the
paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change
his life...
The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The
Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life,
artistic truthfulness and conventional decency - and about those
implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing
one for the other.
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.
