Gripping. . . . A masterly, often unnerving blend of tenderness, harshness, insight, and wit." —The New York Times Book Review
"A bitter, often funny, always engrossing story. . . . The idealisms and hypocrisies of the postwar period [are] brilliantly resurrected." —The New York Review of Books
"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
I Married a Communist tells of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, who begins life as a teenage ditchdigger in 1930s Newark, becomes a bigtime 1940s radio star, and is destroyed in the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s. In his heyday—when he was a zealous, bullying supporter of “progressive” political causes—Ira marries Hollywood silent-film star Eve Frame. Their honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve’s scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies him as “an American taking his orders from Moscow.”
This story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge is a brilliant portrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch, when anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.
PHILIP ROTH (1933–2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. 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 twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 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" and the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six-year history of the prize to win it twice.
In 2005 Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. 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. In 2012 he won Spain's highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013 he received France's highest honor, Commander of the Legion of Honor.
