The Human Stain

Author: Roth, Philip

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 5 April 2001 by Vintage Publishing (Vintage) in the United Kingdom.

'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand'- Sunday TelegraphPhilip Roth's brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America - a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a CommunistIt is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town a distinguished classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth 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 comes upon Silk's secret, and sets out to unearth his former buried life, piecing the biographical fragments back together. This is against backdrop of seismic shifts in American history, which take on real, human urgency as Zuckerman discovers more and more about Silk's past and his futile search for renewal and regeneration.

PRAISE FOR THE HUMAN STAIN:'One of the most beautiful books I've ever read' Red'[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race' Guardian'A masterpiece' Mail on Sunday