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 March 19, 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighborhood his writing returned to time and again.

Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers. American Pastoral (1997) won the Pulitzer Prize.

Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Roth died at the age of eighty-five on May 22, 2018, six years after retiring from writing.

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