The Human Stain
A classics professor is destroyed for a word he did not mean, while guarding a secret nobody suspects.
Coleman Silk, a classics professor at a small New England college, uses a word in a roll call that is taken as racial, and the scandal ends his career and, indirectly, his wife. What his accusers cannot know is the secret he has kept for fifty years. Roth published it in 2000 as the last of the trilogy that began with American Pastoral, and it remains his sharpest book about the gap between the identity a person is assigned and the one they choose.
Recommended by 1 Person
Jason Isaacs
Roth inhabits the world of his protagonist so perfectly and navigates the character's big secret with such humanity that it beggars belief that this novel is not autobiographical. Read it in awe.
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