Other Men's Daughters

“Until the day of Merriwether’s departure from the house—a month after his divorce—the Merriwether family looked like an ideally tranquil one” we read on the first page of Other Men’s Daughters. It is the late 1960s, and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are full of long-haired hippies decked out in colorful garb, but Dr. Robert Merriwether, who teaches at Harvard and has been married for a good long time, hardly takes note. Learned, curious, thoughtful, and a creature of habit, Merriwether is anything but an impulsive man, and yet over the summer, while Sarah, his wife, is away on vacation, he meets a summer student, Cynthia Ryder, and before long the two have fallen into bed and in love. Richard Stern’s novel is an elegant and unnerving examination of just how cold and destructive a thing love, “the origin of so much story and disorder,” can be.

Richard Stern (1928–2013) was the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, and was best known for Other Men’s Daughters. His other works include the novels Stitch and Natural Shocks; the short-story collections Packages, Noble Rot, and Almonds to Zhoof; a collection of essays, The Books in Fred Hampton’s Apartment; and a memoir, A Sistermony. He taught literature and creative writing at the University of Chicago from 1955 until he retired in 2001.

Philip Roth is the author of thirty-one books, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral.

Wendy Doniger is Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago and the author of The Hindus: An Alternative History, On Hinduism, and, most recently, the
volume on Hinduism in The Norton Anthology of World Religions.