Roth The Human Stain

About The Human Stain

Philip Roth's The Human Stain (2000) is the third novel in the American Trilogy and the one many consider his richest — a meditation on race, identity, and the destructive potential of political virtue set during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Coleman Silk, a Classics professor who has spent his career hiding a secret about his own racial identity, is destroyed by a false accusation of racism made by colleagues who know nothing about what he is hiding. Roth interweaves Coleman's secret, the accusation, and his affair with the much younger Faunia Farley into a novel of extraordinary moral complexity. Along with American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), it forms the American Trilogy — Roth's panoramic examination of American political catastrophe across three decades of the twentieth century.