I Married a Communist

Description

Radio actor Iron Rinn is a big Newark roughneck lighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, an uneducated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in WW2 passionately committed to making the world a better place and winds up instead blacklisted and unemployable, his life in ruins. I Married a Communist is the story of Iron Rinn's denunciation and disgrace. It is also a story of cruelty, humiliation, betrayal and revenge - an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive one - fierce and funny, eloquently rendered and deadly accurate.

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. 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 has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has 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'. Recently 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. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.

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 *