I Married a Communist: American Trilogy (2) - Softcover

Roth, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375707212 ISBN 13: 9780375707216

Publisher: Vintage, 1999

Synopsis

I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.

In his heyday as a star—and as a zealous, bullying supporter of "progressive" political causes—Ira marries Hollywood's beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow."

In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth—who Commonweal calls the "master chronicler of the American twentieth century—has written a brilliant fictional protrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when the anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.

About this title

Review:

There was a time in America's not-so-distant past when a person could get genuinely punished for having unpopular beliefs, when pushing for workers' rights could get someone in serious trouble. Ron Silver gives voice to one of those people, retired schoolteacher Murray Ringold, one of the most colorful and passionate characters to emerge from Philip Roth's immense canon. Silver doesn't try to capture the cracks and wheezes of a 90-year-old man's voice (a good thing, considering this unabridged audiocassette's length); instead, he goes for the cadences, the pain from wounds incurred decades ago but recounted so vividly you'd think they happened yesterday. (Running time: 11 hours, eight cassettes) --Lou Schuler

About the Author:

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. 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0375707212
• ISBN 13: 9780375707216
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 323