The Human Stain - Philip Roth

Publisher:Vintage - The Human Stain - Philip Roth

Description:

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.

Set in 1990s America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth's eloquent trilogy of post-war, American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the 'human stain' that so ineradicably marks human nature.