I Married a Communist

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy * Financial Times *Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity * Mail on Sunday *One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails – Xan Brooks * Guardian *Quintessential Philip Roth * Sunday Telegraph *A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology * Observer *Roth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit…a gripping novel * New York Times Book Review *Roth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was forty years ago * New York Review of Books *I Married a Communist proves that, following the success of Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, he remains on extraordinary form… Wonderful storytelling and characterisation * Guardian, Books of the Year *The McCarthy era has faded, eerily, into nostalgia, just as Capitol Hill produces its own 90s version of witch-hunt and communal obsession with enemies of the state, and perversions of justice perpetrated in democracy’s name. Roth avoids nostalgia by making his narrator an active, if unwitting participant in the original drama, caught up in political currents and counter-currents he did not comprehend at the time * Lisa Jardine *Roth’s conflicted, many-layered characters give this work memorable force * Guardian *

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.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.