The Plot Against America Reading Order

The Plot Against America (2004) by Philip Roth is an alternative history novel in which Charles Lindbergh — the aviator and Nazi sympathizer — defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and pursues a policy of American isolationism and quiet anti-Semitism. Narrated by a child named Philip Roth growing up in Newark, New Jersey, the novel follows the Roth family as Lindbergh's presidency makes their comfortable American Jewish life increasingly precarious. Roth uses the alternative history frame to examine the fragility of American liberal democracy and the specific vulnerability of minority communities within it — questions that felt newly urgent when the novel was published and have felt so again since.