The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writerintroduces 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 epilogueZuckerman Bound,The Ghost Writeris about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decencyand about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for <b>Patrimony</b> (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for <b>Operation Shylock</b> (1993), the National Book Award for <b>Sabbath's Theater</b> (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for <b>American Pastoral</b> (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for <b>I Married a Communist</b> (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 <b>The Counterlife</b> (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, <b>Goodbye, Columbus</b> (1959). In 2000 he published <b>The Human Stain</b>, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological eth