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The Plot Against America

Part of Vintage International

Author Philip Roth
Look inside
Best Seller
Paperback
$17.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
5.18"W x 8.01"H x 0.88"D  
On sale Sep 27, 2005 | 416 Pages | 978-1-4000-7949-0
| Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > Graphic Novels > Science Fiction
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > Historical Fiction: Alternative History
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > Science & Speculative Fiction > Dystopian
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > Social Themes > Prejudice & Racism
  • About
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Winner of the James Fennimore Cooper Prize
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

Philip Roth asserts his enduring stature as our most ambitious and inventive writer with this stunning new novel, which re-imagines American history and traces its ominous impact on one Jewish family. 

In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler and the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For 7-year-old Philip Roth of Newark, these developments are just the first in a series of ruptures that will threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America, and with it his family. The Plot Against America is a brave, revelatory, enthralling work that seems to break down the barrier between the past and our endangered present. 

“A terrific political novel. . . . Sinister, vivid, dreamlike . . . creepily plausible. . . . You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving. . . . Far and away the most outward-looking, expansive . . . book Roth has written.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Roth’s most powerful book to date. Confounding and illuminating, enraging and discomfiting, imaginative and utterly—terrifyingly—believable.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Once again, Philip Roth has published a novel that you must read–now . . . . A stunning work.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“It’s not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish—and also funnier and more bizarre—as is goes along. . . . [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle.” —The New Yorker

“Intimately observed characters in situations fraught with society’s deepest, most bitter tensions. . . . Too ingeniously excruciating to put down.” —Newsweek

“Never has [Roth’s voice] been more nuanced . . . beautifully particularized. . . . [A] novelist who for 45 years has been continuously reinventing himself, never more notably than in The Plot Against America.” —The Boston Globe

“Ingenious . . . Roth’s gorgeous and forceful prose, which swirls and dances and rages . . . has never seemed more precise and lucid.” —Star-Telegram (Dallas/Fort Worth)

“Raises the stakes as high as a patriotic novel can take them. . . . Effortlessly, it seems, Roth has led us to suspend disbelief; then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief and finally removes it. . . . A fabulous yarn.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Roth takes readers on a harrowing safari across interdimensional borders into a bizarre version of his hometown. . . . [His] delivery is so matter-of-fact, so documentary deadpan that when we’re 10 pages into the book our own world starts to seem like a flimsy fantasy.” —Time

“The most compelling of living writers. . . . [His] every book is like a dispatch from the deepest recesses of the national mind.” —New York Magazine

“A richly terrifying historical novel. . . . [Roth is] the greatest fiction writer America has ever produced.” —Esquire

“Provocative. . . . At times, deeply affecting. . . . An intimate glimpse of one family's harrowing encounter with history.” —The New York Times

“A harrowing novel of political psychology. . . . It may be the saddest book Roth has written and the most frightening.” —The Village Voice

“The newest triumph in what is surely the most prolific late blossoming in literary history. Roth is writing the best books of his life, chronicling the American century…Today’s artists need to tell us about our world, but maybe they need to do it in camouflage. Philip Roth, an old master, has shown the way.” —Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian

“At 71, Roth has produced a sensation with The Plot Against America, casting the post-September 11 era in a chilling new light.” —The Sunday Times

“One of the world's most brilliant writers. . . . In the end it comes down to words, to Roth's mastery of language...His words fly off the page, his sentences gathering a momentum that hauls the reader along to a place beyond mere critical appraisal.” —Sean O'Hagan, The Observer

“He is without doubt the greatest novelist writing in English today. Anyone, anywhere, interested in construction of a sentence would have to admire, and be enthralled by his writing. Plus, his themes are so significant: the arc of a man's life, the destructive force of history, and all against the backdrop that spans his own lifetime. It's an enormous undertaking, and, more than any other writer, he has the command of language and form required to pull it off. . . . There are times when his prose just ignites and roars into life like a match to a boiler and you are caught up and carried along in a way that is so rare in this age of novelistic detachment and irony. It's literally breathtaking, and often you are left thinking, this is something, this is really something.” —Linda Grant

“Roth was one of the few, if not the only writer, who made me put the book down because the laughter was exploding in my chest.” —Howard Jacobson

“He makes people laugh more than anyone else in the world.” —Hermione Lee

“In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth has reasserted the supremacy of the novel over all other literary forms. This is the first fictional masterpiece of the 21st century, and it rings entirely true.” —Norman Lebrecht, Evening Standard

“The high comic seriousness of his enterprise, the verbal exuberance and deftness, the will to give pleasure. He is a tyrannical master of his fictions and his readers.” —David Flusfeder, The Daily Telegraph

“An epic built—painstakingly, passionately, nearly perfectly—of the small structures of the particular. . . . Roth is at the peak of his powers, and he may have more for us yet.” —Erica Wagner, The Times

“Another frighteningly intense performance' from Roth.” —Christopher Tayler, The Sunday Telegraph

“Philip Roth just knocked me on my ass.” —Bruce Springsteen
© Nancy Crampton
PHILIP ROTH 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. 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. View titles by Philip Roth
June 1940–October 1940

Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War

FEAR PRESIDES over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.
When the first shock came in June of 1940--the nomination for the presidency of Charles A. Lindbergh, America's international aviation hero, by the Republican Convention at Philadelphia--my father was thirty-nine, an insurance agent with a grade school education, earning a little under fifty dollars a week, enough for the basic bills to be paid on time but for little more. My mother--who'd wanted to go to teachers' college but couldn't because of the expense, who'd lived at home working as an office secretary after finishing high school, who'd kept us from feeling poor during the worst of the Depression by budgeting the earnings my father turned over to her each Friday as efficiently as she ran the household--was thirty-six. My brother, Sandy, a seventh-grader with a prodigy's talent for drawing, was twelve, and I, a third-grader a term ahead of himself--and an embryonic stamp collector inspired like millions of kids by the country's foremost philatelist, President Roosevelt--was seven.

We lived in the second-floor flat of a small two-and-a-half-family house on a tree-lined street of frame wooden houses with red-brick stoops, each stoop topped with a gable roof and fronted by a tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut hedge. The Weequahic neighborhood had been built on farm lots at the undeveloped southwest edge of Newark just after World War One, some half dozen of the streets named, imperially, for victorious naval commanders in the Spanish-American War and the local movie house called, after FDR's fifth cousin--and the country's twenty-sixth president--the Roosevelt. Our street, Summit Avenue, sat at the crest of the neighborhood hill, an elevation as high as any in a port city that rarely rises a hundred feet above the level of the tidal salt marsh to the city's north and east and the deep bay due east of the airport that bends around the oil tanks of the Bayonne peninsula and merges there with New York Bay to flow past the Statue of Liberty and into the Atlantic. Looking west from our bedroom's rear window we could sometimes see inland as far as the dark treeline of the Watchungs, a low-lying mountain range fringed by great estates and affluent, sparsely populated suburbs, the extreme edge of the known world--and about eight miles from our house. A block to the south was the working-class town of Hillside, whose population was predominantly Gentile. The boundary with Hillside marked the beginning of Union County, another New Jersey entirely.

We were a happy family in 1940. My parents were outgoing, hospitable people, their friends culled from among my father's associates at the office and from the women who along with my mother had helped to organize the Parent-Teacher Association at newly built Chancellor Avenue School, where my brother and I were pupils. All were Jews. The neighborhood men either were in business for themselves--the owners of the local candy store, grocery store, jewelry store, dress shop, furniture shop, service station, and delicatessen, or the proprietors of tiny industrial job shops over by the Newark-Irvington line, or self-employed plumbers, electricians, housepainters, and boilermen--or were foot-soldier salesmen like my father, out every day in the city streets and in people's houses, peddling their wares on commission. The Jewish doctors and lawyers and the successful merchants who owned big stores downtown lived in one-family houses on streets branching off the eastern slope of the Chancellor Avenue hill, closer to grassy, wooded Weequahic Park, a landscaped three hundred acres whose boating lake, golf course, and harness-racing track separated the Weequahic section from the industrial plants and shipping terminals lining Route 27 and the Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct east of that and the burgeoning airport east of that and the very edge of America east of that--the depots and docks of Newark Bay, where they unloaded cargo from around the world.

At the western end of the neighborhood, the parkless end where we lived, there resided an occasional schoolteacher or pharmacist but otherwise few professionals were among our immediate neighbors and certainly none of the prosperous entrepreneurial or manufacturing families. The men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family's books while simultaneously attending to their children's health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale. A few women labored alongside their husbands in the family-owned stores on the nearby shopping streets, assisted after school and on Saturdays by their older children, who delivered orders and tended stock and did the cleaning up.

It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion. Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outdoors or in the houses I routinely floated through with my boyhood friends. The adults were no longer observant in the outward, recognizable ways, if they were seriously observant at all, and aside from older shopkeepers like the tailor and the kosher butcher--and the ailing or decrepit grandparents living of necessity with their adult offspring--hardly anyone in the vicinity spoke with an accent. By 1940 Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talked to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs. Hebrew lettering was stenciled on the butcher shop window and engraved on the lintels of the small neighborhood synagogues, but nowhere else (other than at the cemetery) did one's eye chance to land on the alphabet of the prayer book rather than on the familiar letters of the native tongue employed all the time by practically everyone for every conceivable purpose, high or low. At the newsstand out front of the corner candy store, ten times more customers bought the Racing Form than the Yiddish daily, the Forvertz.

Israel didn't yet exist, six million European Jews hadn't yet ceased to exist, and the local relevance of distant Palestine (under British mandate since the 1918 dissolution by the victorious Allies of the last far-flung provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire) was a mystery to me. When a stranger who did wear a beard and who never once was seen hatless appeared every few months after dark to ask in broken English for a contribution toward the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, I, who wasn't an ignorant child, didn't quite know what he was doing on our landing. My parents would give me or Sandy a couple of coins to drop into his collection box, largess, I always thought, dispensed out of kindness so as not to hurt the feelings of a poor old man who, from one year to the next, seemed unable to get it through his head that we'd already had a homeland for three generations. I pledged allegiance to the flag of our homeland every morning at school. I sang of its marvels with my classmates at assembly programs. I eagerly observed its national holidays, and without giving a second thought to my affinity for the Fourth of July fireworks or the Thanksgiving turkey or the Decoration Day double-header. Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.

For nearly a decade Lindbergh was as great a hero in our neighborhood as he was everywhere else. The completion of his thirty-three-and-a-half-hour nonstop solo flight from Long Island to Paris in the tiny monoplane the Spirit of St. Louis even happened to coincide with the day in the spring of 1927 that my mother discovered herself to be pregnant with my older brother. As a consequence, the young aviator whose daring had thrilled America and the world and whose achievement bespoke a future of unimaginable aeronautical progress came to occupy a special niche in the gallery of family anecdotes that generate a child's first cohesive mythology. The mystery of pregnancy and the heroism of Lindbergh combined to give a distinction bordering on the divine to my very own mother, for whom nothing less than a global annunciation had accompanied the incarnation of her first child. Sandy would later record this moment with a drawing illustrating the juxtaposition of those two splendid events. In the drawing--completed at the age of nine and smacking inadvertently of Soviet poster art--Sandy envisioned her miles from our house, amid a joyous crowd on the corner of Broad and Market. A slender young woman of twenty-three with dark hair and a smile that is all robust delight, she is surprisingly on her own and wearing her floral-patterned kitchen apron at the intersection of the city's two busiest thoroughfares, one hand spread wide across the front of the apron, where the span of her hips is still deceptively girlish, while with the other she alone in the crowd is pointing skyward to the Spirit of St. Louis, passing visibly above downtown Newark at precisely the moment she comes to realize that, in a feat no less triumphant for a mortal than Lindbergh's, she has conceived Sanford Roth.

Sandy was four and I, Philip, wasn't yet born when in March 1932, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's own first child, a boy whose arrival twenty months earlier had been an occasion for national rejoicing, was kidnapped from his family's secluded new house in rural Hopewell, New Jersey. Some ten weeks later the decomposing body of the baby was discovered by chance in woods a few miles away. The baby had been either murdered or killed accidentally after being snatched from his crib and, in the dark, still in bedclothes, carried out a window of the second-story nursery and down a makeshift ladder to the ground while the nurse and mother were occupied in their ordinary evening activities in another part of the house. By the time the kidnapping and murder trial in Flemington, New Jersey, concluded in February 1935 with the conviction of Bruno Hauptmann--a German ex-con of thirty-five living in the Bronx with his German wife--the boldness of the world's first transatlantic solo pilot had been permeated with a pathos that transformed him into a martyred titan comparable to Lincoln.

Following the trial, the Lindberghs left America, hoping through a temporary expatriation to protect a new Lindbergh infant from harm and to recover some measure of the privacy they coveted. The family moved to a small village in England, and from there, as a private citizen, Lindbergh began taking the trips to Nazi Germany that would transform him into a villain for most American Jews. In the course of five visits, during which he was able to familiarize himself at first hand with the magnitude of the German war machine, he was ostentatiously entertained by Air Marshal Göring, he was ceremoniously decorated in the name of the Führer, and he expressed quite openly his high regard for Hitler, calling Germany the world's "most interesting nation" and its leader "a great man." And all this interest and admiration after Hitler's 1935 racial laws had denied Germany's Jews their civil, social, and property rights, nullified their citizenship, and forbidden intermarriage with Aryans.

By the time I began school in 1938, Lindbergh's was a name that provoked the same sort of indignation in our house as did the weekly Sunday radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, the Detroit-area priest who edited a right-wing weekly called Social Justice and whose anti-Semitic virulence aroused the passions of a sizable audience during the country's hard times. It was in November 1938--the darkest, most ominous year for the Jews of Europe in eighteen centuries--that the worst pogrom in modern history, Kristallnacht, was instigated by the Nazis all across Germany: synagogues incinerated, the residences and businesses of Jews destroyed, and, throughout a night presaging the monstrous future, Jews by the thousands forcibly taken from their homes and transported to concentration camps. When it was suggested to Lindbergh that in response to this unprecedented savagery, perpetrated by a state on its own native-born, he might consider returning the gold cross decorated with four swastikas bestowed on him in behalf of the Führer by Air Marshal Göring, he declined on the grounds that for him to publicly surrender the Service Cross of the German Eagle would constitute "an unnecessary insult" to the Nazi leadership.

Lindbergh was the first famous living American whom I learned to hate--just as President Roosevelt was the first famous living American whom I was taught to love--and so his nomination by the Republicans to run against Roosevelt in 1940 assaulted, as nothing ever had before, that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.
Copyright © 2005 by Philip Roth. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Discussion Guide for The Plot Against America

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  • WINNER
    New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age
  • WINNER | 2005
    James Fennimore Cooper Prize
  • FINALIST
    National Book Critics Circle Awards
“A terrific political novel.... Sinister, vivid, dreamlike ... creepily plausible.... You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving.... Far and away the most outward-looking, expansive ... book Roth has written.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Roth’s most powerfrul book to date. Confounding and illuminating, enraging and discomfiting, imaginative and utterly–terrifyingly–believable.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Once again, Philip Roth has published a novel that you must read–now.... A stunning work.” —The Christian Science Monitor 

“It’s not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish–and also funnier and more bizarre–as is goes along.... [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle.” —The New Yorker

“Ambitious and chilling ... a breath-taking leap of imagination.... The writing is brilliant.” —USA Today

“Intimately observed characters in situations fraught with society’s deepest, most bitter tensions.... Too ingeniously excruciating to put down.” —Newsweek

“Never has [Roth’s voice] been more nuanced ... beautifully particularized.... [A] novelist who for 45 years has been continuously reinventing himself, never more notably than in The Plot Against America.” —The Boston Globe

“Ingenious ... Roth’s gorgeous and forceful prose, which swirls and dances and rages . . . has never seemed more precise and lucid.” —Star-Telegram (Dallas/Fort Worth) 

“Raises the stakes as high as a patriotic novel can take them.... Effortlessly, it seems, Roth has led us to suspend disbelief; then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief and finally removes it.... A fabulous yarn.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A remarkable act of historical imagination and one of [Roth’s] most moving novels.” —People 

“Roth takes readers on a harrowing safari across interdimensional borders into a bizarre version of his hometown.... [His] delivery is so matter-of-fact, so documentary deadpan that when we’re 10 pages into the book our own world starts to seem like a flimsy fantasy.” —Time

“The most compelling of living writers.... [His] every book is like a dispatch from the deepest recesses of the national mind.” —New York Magazine

“A richly terrifying historical novel.... [Roth is] the greatest fiction writer America has ever produced.” —Esquire

“The writing is extraordinary, complex but highly readable, evocative, and colored with a tenderness and affection.... This is one of Roth’s finest books.” —O (The Oprah Magazine)

About

Winner of the James Fennimore Cooper Prize
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

Philip Roth asserts his enduring stature as our most ambitious and inventive writer with this stunning new novel, which re-imagines American history and traces its ominous impact on one Jewish family. 

In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler and the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For 7-year-old Philip Roth of Newark, these developments are just the first in a series of ruptures that will threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America, and with it his family. The Plot Against America is a brave, revelatory, enthralling work that seems to break down the barrier between the past and our endangered present. 

“A terrific political novel. . . . Sinister, vivid, dreamlike . . . creepily plausible. . . . You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” — The New York Times Book Review

“Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving. . . . Far and away the most outward-looking, expansive . . . book Roth has written.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Roth’s most powerful book to date. Confounding and illuminating, enraging and discomfiting, imaginative and utterly—terrifyingly—believable.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Once again, Philip Roth has published a novel that you must read–now . . . . A stunning work.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“It’s not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish—and also funnier and more bizarre—as is goes along. . . . [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle.” —The New Yorker

“Intimately observed characters in situations fraught with society’s deepest, most bitter tensions. . . . Too ingeniously excruciating to put down.” —Newsweek

“Never has [Roth’s voice] been more nuanced . . . beautifully particularized. . . . [A] novelist who for 45 years has been continuously reinventing himself, never more notably than in The Plot Against America.” —The Boston Globe

“Ingenious . . . Roth’s gorgeous and forceful prose, which swirls and dances and rages . . . has never seemed more precise and lucid.” —Star-Telegram (Dallas/Fort Worth)

“Raises the stakes as high as a patriotic novel can take them. . . . Effortlessly, it seems, Roth has led us to suspend disbelief; then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief and finally removes it. . . . A fabulous yarn.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Roth takes readers on a harrowing safari across interdimensional borders into a bizarre version of his hometown. . . . [His] delivery is so matter-of-fact, so documentary deadpan that when we’re 10 pages into the book our own world starts to seem like a flimsy fantasy.” —Time

“The most compelling of living writers. . . . [His] every book is like a dispatch from the deepest recesses of the national mind.” —New York Magazine

“A richly terrifying historical novel. . . . [Roth is] the greatest fiction writer America has ever produced.” —Esquire

“Provocative. . . . At times, deeply affecting. . . . An intimate glimpse of one family's harrowing encounter with history.” —The New York Times

“A harrowing novel of political psychology. . . . It may be the saddest book Roth has written and the most frightening.” —The Village Voice

“The newest triumph in what is surely the most prolific late blossoming in literary history. Roth is writing the best books of his life, chronicling the American century…Today’s artists need to tell us about our world, but maybe they need to do it in camouflage. Philip Roth, an old master, has shown the way.” —Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian

“At 71, Roth has produced a sensation with The Plot Against America, casting the post-September 11 era in a chilling new light.” —The Sunday Times

“One of the world's most brilliant writers. . . . In the end it comes down to words, to Roth's mastery of language...His words fly off the page, his sentences gathering a momentum that hauls the reader along to a place beyond mere critical appraisal.” —Sean O'Hagan, The Observer

“He is without doubt the greatest novelist writing in English today. Anyone, anywhere, interested in construction of a sentence would have to admire, and be enthralled by his writing. Plus, his themes are so significant: the arc of a man's life, the destructive force of history, and all against the backdrop that spans his own lifetime. It's an enormous undertaking, and, more than any other writer, he has the command of language and form required to pull it off. . . . There are times when his prose just ignites and roars into life like a match to a boiler and you are caught up and carried along in a way that is so rare in this age of novelistic detachment and irony. It's literally breathtaking, and often you are left thinking, this is something, this is really something.” —Linda Grant

“Roth was one of the few, if not the only writer, who made me put the book down because the laughter was exploding in my chest.” —Howard Jacobson

“He makes people laugh more than anyone else in the world.” —Hermione Lee

“In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth has reasserted the supremacy of the novel over all other literary forms. This is the first fictional masterpiece of the 21st century, and it rings entirely true.” —Norman Lebrecht, Evening Standard

“The high comic seriousness of his enterprise, the verbal exuberance and deftness, the will to give pleasure. He is a tyrannical master of his fictions and his readers.” —David Flusfeder, The Daily Telegraph

“An epic built—painstakingly, passionately, nearly perfectly—of the small structures of the particular. . . . Roth is at the peak of his powers, and he may have more for us yet.” —Erica Wagner, The Times

“Another frighteningly intense performance' from Roth.” —Christopher Tayler, The Sunday Telegraph

“Philip Roth just knocked me on my ass.” —Bruce Springsteen

Author

© Nancy Crampton
PHILIP ROTH 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. 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. View titles by Philip Roth

Excerpt

June 1940–October 1940

Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War

FEAR PRESIDES over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.
When the first shock came in June of 1940--the nomination for the presidency of Charles A. Lindbergh, America's international aviation hero, by the Republican Convention at Philadelphia--my father was thirty-nine, an insurance agent with a grade school education, earning a little under fifty dollars a week, enough for the basic bills to be paid on time but for little more. My mother--who'd wanted to go to teachers' college but couldn't because of the expense, who'd lived at home working as an office secretary after finishing high school, who'd kept us from feeling poor during the worst of the Depression by budgeting the earnings my father turned over to her each Friday as efficiently as she ran the household--was thirty-six. My brother, Sandy, a seventh-grader with a prodigy's talent for drawing, was twelve, and I, a third-grader a term ahead of himself--and an embryonic stamp collector inspired like millions of kids by the country's foremost philatelist, President Roosevelt--was seven.

We lived in the second-floor flat of a small two-and-a-half-family house on a tree-lined street of frame wooden houses with red-brick stoops, each stoop topped with a gable roof and fronted by a tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut hedge. The Weequahic neighborhood had been built on farm lots at the undeveloped southwest edge of Newark just after World War One, some half dozen of the streets named, imperially, for victorious naval commanders in the Spanish-American War and the local movie house called, after FDR's fifth cousin--and the country's twenty-sixth president--the Roosevelt. Our street, Summit Avenue, sat at the crest of the neighborhood hill, an elevation as high as any in a port city that rarely rises a hundred feet above the level of the tidal salt marsh to the city's north and east and the deep bay due east of the airport that bends around the oil tanks of the Bayonne peninsula and merges there with New York Bay to flow past the Statue of Liberty and into the Atlantic. Looking west from our bedroom's rear window we could sometimes see inland as far as the dark treeline of the Watchungs, a low-lying mountain range fringed by great estates and affluent, sparsely populated suburbs, the extreme edge of the known world--and about eight miles from our house. A block to the south was the working-class town of Hillside, whose population was predominantly Gentile. The boundary with Hillside marked the beginning of Union County, another New Jersey entirely.

We were a happy family in 1940. My parents were outgoing, hospitable people, their friends culled from among my father's associates at the office and from the women who along with my mother had helped to organize the Parent-Teacher Association at newly built Chancellor Avenue School, where my brother and I were pupils. All were Jews. The neighborhood men either were in business for themselves--the owners of the local candy store, grocery store, jewelry store, dress shop, furniture shop, service station, and delicatessen, or the proprietors of tiny industrial job shops over by the Newark-Irvington line, or self-employed plumbers, electricians, housepainters, and boilermen--or were foot-soldier salesmen like my father, out every day in the city streets and in people's houses, peddling their wares on commission. The Jewish doctors and lawyers and the successful merchants who owned big stores downtown lived in one-family houses on streets branching off the eastern slope of the Chancellor Avenue hill, closer to grassy, wooded Weequahic Park, a landscaped three hundred acres whose boating lake, golf course, and harness-racing track separated the Weequahic section from the industrial plants and shipping terminals lining Route 27 and the Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct east of that and the burgeoning airport east of that and the very edge of America east of that--the depots and docks of Newark Bay, where they unloaded cargo from around the world.

At the western end of the neighborhood, the parkless end where we lived, there resided an occasional schoolteacher or pharmacist but otherwise few professionals were among our immediate neighbors and certainly none of the prosperous entrepreneurial or manufacturing families. The men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family's books while simultaneously attending to their children's health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale. A few women labored alongside their husbands in the family-owned stores on the nearby shopping streets, assisted after school and on Saturdays by their older children, who delivered orders and tended stock and did the cleaning up.

It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion. Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outdoors or in the houses I routinely floated through with my boyhood friends. The adults were no longer observant in the outward, recognizable ways, if they were seriously observant at all, and aside from older shopkeepers like the tailor and the kosher butcher--and the ailing or decrepit grandparents living of necessity with their adult offspring--hardly anyone in the vicinity spoke with an accent. By 1940 Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talked to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs. Hebrew lettering was stenciled on the butcher shop window and engraved on the lintels of the small neighborhood synagogues, but nowhere else (other than at the cemetery) did one's eye chance to land on the alphabet of the prayer book rather than on the familiar letters of the native tongue employed all the time by practically everyone for every conceivable purpose, high or low. At the newsstand out front of the corner candy store, ten times more customers bought the Racing Form than the Yiddish daily, the Forvertz.

Israel didn't yet exist, six million European Jews hadn't yet ceased to exist, and the local relevance of distant Palestine (under British mandate since the 1918 dissolution by the victorious Allies of the last far-flung provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire) was a mystery to me. When a stranger who did wear a beard and who never once was seen hatless appeared every few months after dark to ask in broken English for a contribution toward the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, I, who wasn't an ignorant child, didn't quite know what he was doing on our landing. My parents would give me or Sandy a couple of coins to drop into his collection box, largess, I always thought, dispensed out of kindness so as not to hurt the feelings of a poor old man who, from one year to the next, seemed unable to get it through his head that we'd already had a homeland for three generations. I pledged allegiance to the flag of our homeland every morning at school. I sang of its marvels with my classmates at assembly programs. I eagerly observed its national holidays, and without giving a second thought to my affinity for the Fourth of July fireworks or the Thanksgiving turkey or the Decoration Day double-header. Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.

For nearly a decade Lindbergh was as great a hero in our neighborhood as he was everywhere else. The completion of his thirty-three-and-a-half-hour nonstop solo flight from Long Island to Paris in the tiny monoplane the Spirit of St. Louis even happened to coincide with the day in the spring of 1927 that my mother discovered herself to be pregnant with my older brother. As a consequence, the young aviator whose daring had thrilled America and the world and whose achievement bespoke a future of unimaginable aeronautical progress came to occupy a special niche in the gallery of family anecdotes that generate a child's first cohesive mythology. The mystery of pregnancy and the heroism of Lindbergh combined to give a distinction bordering on the divine to my very own mother, for whom nothing less than a global annunciation had accompanied the incarnation of her first child. Sandy would later record this moment with a drawing illustrating the juxtaposition of those two splendid events. In the drawing--completed at the age of nine and smacking inadvertently of Soviet poster art--Sandy envisioned her miles from our house, amid a joyous crowd on the corner of Broad and Market. A slender young woman of twenty-three with dark hair and a smile that is all robust delight, she is surprisingly on her own and wearing her floral-patterned kitchen apron at the intersection of the city's two busiest thoroughfares, one hand spread wide across the front of the apron, where the span of her hips is still deceptively girlish, while with the other she alone in the crowd is pointing skyward to the Spirit of St. Louis, passing visibly above downtown Newark at precisely the moment she comes to realize that, in a feat no less triumphant for a mortal than Lindbergh's, she has conceived Sanford Roth.

Sandy was four and I, Philip, wasn't yet born when in March 1932, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's own first child, a boy whose arrival twenty months earlier had been an occasion for national rejoicing, was kidnapped from his family's secluded new house in rural Hopewell, New Jersey. Some ten weeks later the decomposing body of the baby was discovered by chance in woods a few miles away. The baby had been either murdered or killed accidentally after being snatched from his crib and, in the dark, still in bedclothes, carried out a window of the second-story nursery and down a makeshift ladder to the ground while the nurse and mother were occupied in their ordinary evening activities in another part of the house. By the time the kidnapping and murder trial in Flemington, New Jersey, concluded in February 1935 with the conviction of Bruno Hauptmann--a German ex-con of thirty-five living in the Bronx with his German wife--the boldness of the world's first transatlantic solo pilot had been permeated with a pathos that transformed him into a martyred titan comparable to Lincoln.

Following the trial, the Lindberghs left America, hoping through a temporary expatriation to protect a new Lindbergh infant from harm and to recover some measure of the privacy they coveted. The family moved to a small village in England, and from there, as a private citizen, Lindbergh began taking the trips to Nazi Germany that would transform him into a villain for most American Jews. In the course of five visits, during which he was able to familiarize himself at first hand with the magnitude of the German war machine, he was ostentatiously entertained by Air Marshal Göring, he was ceremoniously decorated in the name of the Führer, and he expressed quite openly his high regard for Hitler, calling Germany the world's "most interesting nation" and its leader "a great man." And all this interest and admiration after Hitler's 1935 racial laws had denied Germany's Jews their civil, social, and property rights, nullified their citizenship, and forbidden intermarriage with Aryans.

By the time I began school in 1938, Lindbergh's was a name that provoked the same sort of indignation in our house as did the weekly Sunday radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, the Detroit-area priest who edited a right-wing weekly called Social Justice and whose anti-Semitic virulence aroused the passions of a sizable audience during the country's hard times. It was in November 1938--the darkest, most ominous year for the Jews of Europe in eighteen centuries--that the worst pogrom in modern history, Kristallnacht, was instigated by the Nazis all across Germany: synagogues incinerated, the residences and businesses of Jews destroyed, and, throughout a night presaging the monstrous future, Jews by the thousands forcibly taken from their homes and transported to concentration camps. When it was suggested to Lindbergh that in response to this unprecedented savagery, perpetrated by a state on its own native-born, he might consider returning the gold cross decorated with four swastikas bestowed on him in behalf of the Führer by Air Marshal Göring, he declined on the grounds that for him to publicly surrender the Service Cross of the German Eagle would constitute "an unnecessary insult" to the Nazi leadership.

Lindbergh was the first famous living American whom I learned to hate--just as President Roosevelt was the first famous living American whom I was taught to love--and so his nomination by the Republicans to run against Roosevelt in 1940 assaulted, as nothing ever had before, that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.
Copyright © 2005 by Philip Roth. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Guides

Discussion Guide for The Plot Against America

Provides questions, discussion topics, suggested reading lists, introductions and/or author Q&As, which are intended to enhance reading groups’ experiences. Some young-adult specific guides may be correlated to Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

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Awards

  • WINNER
    New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age
  • WINNER | 2005
    James Fennimore Cooper Prize
  • FINALIST
    National Book Critics Circle Awards

Praise

“A terrific political novel.... Sinister, vivid, dreamlike ... creepily plausible.... You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving.... Far and away the most outward-looking, expansive ... book Roth has written.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Roth’s most powerfrul book to date. Confounding and illuminating, enraging and discomfiting, imaginative and utterly–terrifyingly–believable.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Once again, Philip Roth has published a novel that you must read–now.... A stunning work.” —The Christian Science Monitor 

“It’s not a prophecy; it’s a nightmare, and it becomes more nightmarish–and also funnier and more bizarre–as is goes along.... [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle.” —The New Yorker

“Ambitious and chilling ... a breath-taking leap of imagination.... The writing is brilliant.” —USA Today

“Intimately observed characters in situations fraught with society’s deepest, most bitter tensions.... Too ingeniously excruciating to put down.” —Newsweek

“Never has [Roth’s voice] been more nuanced ... beautifully particularized.... [A] novelist who for 45 years has been continuously reinventing himself, never more notably than in The Plot Against America.” —The Boston Globe

“Ingenious ... Roth’s gorgeous and forceful prose, which swirls and dances and rages . . . has never seemed more precise and lucid.” —Star-Telegram (Dallas/Fort Worth) 

“Raises the stakes as high as a patriotic novel can take them.... Effortlessly, it seems, Roth has led us to suspend disbelief; then he makes us believe; then he suspends this belief and finally removes it.... A fabulous yarn.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A remarkable act of historical imagination and one of [Roth’s] most moving novels.” —People 

“Roth takes readers on a harrowing safari across interdimensional borders into a bizarre version of his hometown.... [His] delivery is so matter-of-fact, so documentary deadpan that when we’re 10 pages into the book our own world starts to seem like a flimsy fantasy.” —Time

“The most compelling of living writers.... [His] every book is like a dispatch from the deepest recesses of the national mind.” —New York Magazine

“A richly terrifying historical novel.... [Roth is] the greatest fiction writer America has ever produced.” —Esquire

“The writing is extraordinary, complex but highly readable, evocative, and colored with a tenderness and affection.... This is one of Roth’s finest books.” —O (The Oprah Magazine)

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    $19.00 US
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    $15.00 US
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    $17.00 US
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    $17.00 US
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    $16.95 US
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    $16.95 US
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    The Interpreters
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    $16.95 US
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  • Here We Are
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    Graham Swift
    $16.00 US
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    Aug 10, 2021
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    James Baldwin
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
    Jul 06, 2021
  • Juneteenth
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    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 25, 2021
  • Think, Write, Speak
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    Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
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    $18.00 US
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    $16.95 US
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    $25.00 US
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    $16.95 US
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    Sep 15, 2020
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    Albert Camus
    $16.00 US
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    Javier Marías
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    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
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    $16.95 US
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    Toni Morrison
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 22, 2019
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    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    May 21, 2019
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    Michael Ondaatje
    $16.95 US
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    Apr 02, 2019
  • I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $14.95 US
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    Jan 08, 2019
  • The Myth of Sisyphus
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    Albert Camus
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 06, 2018
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    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Aug 28, 2018
  • Men Without Women
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    Haruki Murakami
    $16.95 US
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    Ha Jin
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    Paperback
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    $18.00 US
    Paperback
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    A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
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    Haruki Murakami
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
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    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
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    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
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    Peter Carey
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    Kahlil Gibran
    $9.95 US
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    $17.00 US
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    Toni Morrison
    $17.00 US
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    James Baldwin
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    James Baldwin
    $15.00 US
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    $24.00 US
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    Truman Capote
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    Haruki Murakami
    $20.00 US
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    Home
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
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    Jan 01, 2013
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    Julian Barnes
    $15.95 US
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    Nov 20, 2012
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    $30.00 US
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    Uncollected Writings
    James Baldwin
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    Sep 06, 2011
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    Paperback
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  • Song of Solomon
    Song of Solomon
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    Paperback
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