I Married a Communist: Philip Roth

I Married a Communist: Philip Roth

by PhilipRoth (Author)

Synopsis

The second novel of Roth's eloquent American trilogy, set in the tempestuous McCarthy era - a brilliant successor to American Pastoral I Married a Communist charts the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, an American roughneck who begins life as a ditchdigger in 1930s New Jersey, becoming a big-time radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star - and as a zealous, bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes - Ira marries Hollywood's beloved leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling expose that identifies Ira as 'an American taking his orders from Moscow'. In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and savage revenge, anti-Communist fever pollutes national politics and infects the relationships of ordinary Americans; friends become deadly enemies, parents and children tragically estranged, lovers blacklisted and felled from vertiginous heights. `Quintessential Philip Roth' Sunday Telegraph

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Edition: 1
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 01 Jul 1999

ISBN 10: 0099287838
ISBN 13: 9780099287834
Book Overview: 'Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or a word in its cracking velocity' Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

Media Reviews
A passionate and coruscating American tragedy * Financial Times *
Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity * Mail on Sunday *
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 *
Author Bio
Philip Roth (1933-2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for `the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004'. Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award `for a body of work . . . of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose `scale of achievement over a sustained career . . . places him or her in the highest rank of American literature'. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize.