Indignation

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Indignation, Philip Roth's twenty-ninth book, is a powerful exploration of a remarkable moment in American history. It is a novel that highlights his masterful ability to re-create a time and a place and to populate it with unforgettable characters, as he has done in American Pastoral, The Plot Against America, and The Human Stain. In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. He is here seeking refuge from his father, a sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, who seems to have gone mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. Far from Newark, Marcus has to find his way around the customs and constrictions of another American world.

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. 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 has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has 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.” Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.