The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff.

At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life.

The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency—and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.