About the Author

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. 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 awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

Reviews

"A bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and place in our common past.... The idealisms and hypocrisies of the postwar period [are] brilliantly resurrected." —Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books

"A remarkable work—remarkable in its stringent observation of American life...remarkable in its wisdom. Mr. Roth has the frantic politics of this frantic time—the McCarthy era—in exact pitch." —Arthur Schlesinger, The New York Observer

"As social history it breathes life. In Ira Ringold, Roth has created one of his singularly ripe, vigorous characters. Ira's dizzying rise and fall out of and back into the working class trace the trajectory of twenty years of American history." —Chicago Tribune

"Philip Roth is an amazing writer.... I Married a Communist may very well become his classic work; perhaps a classic for all time." —The Plain Dealer

"Gripping....  A masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit." —The New York Times Book Review

"I Married a Communist is filled with passages as fine and sharp as anything Roth has ever written (which is to say, as fine and sharp as anything in contemporary American literature)." —The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"I Married a Communist leaves you both dumbfounded and in awe." —Chicago Sun-Times

"[S]eals [Roth's] reputation as a writer at the very top of his game." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

Roth turns from chaotic Sixties (in American Pastoral) to the betrayals of the McCarthy era one decade earlier. When silent-film star Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin) tells the world that her husband, famed radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold), spied for the Commies, all hell breaks loose.

"A bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and place in our common past.... The idealisms and hypocrisies of the postwar period [are] brilliantly resurrected." -Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books

"A remarkable work-remarkable in its stringent observation of American life...remarkable in its wisdom. Mr. Roth has the frantic politics of this frantic time-the McCarthy era-in exact pitch." -Arthur Schlesinger, The New York Observer

"As social history it breathes life. In Ira Ringold, Roth has created one of his singularly ripe, vigorous characters. Ira's dizzying rise and fall out of and back into the working class trace the trajectory of twenty years of American history." -Chicago Tribune

"Philip Roth is an amazing writer.... I Married a Communist may very well become his classic work; perhaps a classic for all time." -The Plain Dealer

"Gripping.... A masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit." -The New York Times Book Review

"I Married a Communist is filled with passages as fine and sharp as anything Roth has ever written (which is to say, as fine and sharp as anything in contemporary American literature)." -The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"I Married a Communist leaves you both dumbfounded and in awe." -Chicago Sun-Times

"[S]eals [Roth's] reputation as a writer at the very top of his game." -The Philadelphia Inquirer