I Married a Communist: Philip Roth (Vintage classics) - Softcover

Roth, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1784875554 ISBN 13: 9781784875558

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2019

Synopsis

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth turns his gaze on 30s and 40s America in this magnificent successor to American Pastoral.

Ira Ringold is an American roughneck who transforms himself from a ditch-digger in 1930s New Jersey, to a radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star – and as a bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes – Ira marries Hollywood's leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies Ira as 'an American taking his orders from Moscow'. In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge friends become deadly enemies, parents and children estranged, lovers blacklisted and the great felled from vertiginous heights.

‘Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity’ Mail on Sunday

‘A passionate and coruscating American tragedy’ Financial Times

About this title

Review:

"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)

About the Author:

Philip Roth was one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. He attended Bucknell University,Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, receiving a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.

In 1959, Roth published his first book Goodbye, Columbus 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. Roth was the author of thirty-one books 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1784875554
• ISBN 13: 9781784875558
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352