The Human Stain

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Roth's 2000 novel, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, is set in a New England college town in 1998 and narrated by Nathan Zuckerman. Coleman Silk, a classics professor and former dean, is accused of racism for using the word "spooks" about two absent students and resigns. As Zuckerman befriends him, he learns of a secret Silk has kept for fifty years.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”