The Human Stain
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  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446400531
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

The Human Stain

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Aug 2019
Paperback
4 May 2001
EBook
1 Jun 2011
Audiobook
14 Mar 2024
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Reissued in electric new backlist style, The Human Stain is one of Philip Roth's bestselling novels and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand'- Sunday Telegraph

Philip Roth's brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America - a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a Communist
It 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
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446400531
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384
Categories:

About the author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.

In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus – a collection of stories, and a novella – for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America’s finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Roth’s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.

portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

Philip Roth: Why Write? (LOA #300)
The Humbling
Nemesis
Indignation
Exit Ghost
The Facts
When She Was Good
See all

Praise for The Human Stain

The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America

Sunday Times

One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand

Sunday Telegraph

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read

Red

An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand'

Sunday Telegraph

A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece

Mail on Sunday

[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race

Arifa Akbar, Guardian

One of his very best -There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. The Human Stain is an extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand. The work of a genius at full throttle

Sunday Telegraph

A novel with an almost Victorian range of scope and characters, all powered by one vast secret and a frenetic and exciting plot-The Human Stain is a novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece

Mail on Sunday

The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America

Sunday Times
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