Staff Pick
The Ghost Writer is a slim, underrated, and beautiful novel that was a finalist for the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In her biography of Philip Roth, Roth Unbound, Claudia Roth Pierpont compared The Ghost Writer to The Great Gatsby for how much was packed into so few pages. It's the first of Roth's novels with the character Nathan Zuckerman and a great gateway to his work. In it Roth asks the question, "What if Anne Frank survived the Holocaust?" in the middle of a story about a young writer visiting an aging author he looks up to. I put The Ghost Writer in my 10 favorite books of all time. It sits in the middle of one of the greatest American authors's catalog. Recommended By Jeffrey J., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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 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.
Synopsis
The novel that first introduced the Pulitzer Prize-winnning author's most acclaimed character, Nathan Zuckerman, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, who meets a haunting young woman at the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol.
Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power--the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale--is superb. --The Washington Post
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.
Synopsis
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 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.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 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.
About the Author
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.