About this item
In this imaginative novel, Philip Roth converts the status of baseball from a national myth and pastime into the basis for biting satire, replete with heroism and treachery, wordplay, and an unforgettable cast of characters. Locked away in an asylum, once-famous sports journalist Word Smith attempts to write the great American novel through the story of one of the United States' most celebrated baseball teams. The team's epic feats in the now-defunct Patriot League were soon forgotten when, in the mid-1940s, a Communist conspiracy infiltrated the heart of the United States in an effort to destroy the American way of life from the inside. Starting with baseball, it sabotaged one of the country's top baseball teams, and the fortunes of its leaders and players along with it.
About the Author
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991) , the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993) , the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995) , and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997) . He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998) ; in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) . In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient." In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003--2004." In 2007 Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.
