The Human Stain

Winner of the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished 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 stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

"Roth almost never fails to surprise....The book continues to unfold layer after layer of meaning....Roth is working here at the peak of his imaginative skills, creating many scenes at once sharply observed and moving..." Publishers Weekly

"The Human Stain is an astonishing, uneven and often very beautiful book." Lorrie Moore, The New York Times Book Review

"[I]mpressively replete and very moving....A marvel of imaginative empathy, generosity, and tact. Roth's late maturity looks more and more like his golden age." Kirkus Reviews

"Philip Roth's The Human Stain is the best novel he has written....Here, everything the writer has learnt and experienced within that indefinable form we call the novel...have come to full realization." Nadine Gordimer, The Times Literary Supplement (International Book of the Year Selection)

"A master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment." Sam Tanenhaus, The Wall Street Journal

"The passages get more and more brilliant — so brilliant you can't stand it anymore — and then he goes himself one better....[Roth] is, word for word, paragraph for paragraph, Mozartean, simply unsurpassable." The New York Observer

"[A] marvelous new novel....In The Human Stain, widely and justly praised, Roth stretches his imaginative sympathies..." Newsweek

Set in 1998, when ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciations and rituals of purification, the newest novel by award-winning author Philip Roth concludes his eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives begun in American Pastoral and continued in I Married a Communist.

In the 1990s Philip Roth won Americas four major literary

awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle

Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for

Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbaths

Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for

American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book

Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist

(1998); in the same year he received the National

Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the

National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife

(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,

Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human

Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos

of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received

his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britains W. H.

Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he

received the highest award of the American Academy of

Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six

years “for the entire work of the recipient.” In 2005 The

Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians

Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an

American theme for 20032004.” In 2007 Roth received the

PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.