The Ghost Writer

by Philip Roth

Overview

The novel that first introduced the Pulitzer Prize–winnning author’s most acclaimed character, Nathan Zuckerman, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, who meets a haunting young woman at the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol.

"Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power—the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale—is superb." —The Washington Post

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 epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency—and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679748984
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/01/1995
Series:	Vintage International
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	315,162
Product dimensions:	5.22(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

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 twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He 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.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

Hometown:

Connecticut

Date of Birth:

March 19, 1933

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1954; M.A. in English, University of Chicago, 1955

Editorial Reviews

"Roth's most controlled and elegant work ... serious, intelligent, dramatic, acutely vivid, slyly and wickedly funny ... seductive far beyond its brief efficiency." —Village Voice

"I had only to read the two opening sentences to realize that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller." —The New York Review of Books

"Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power—the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale—is superb." —The Washington Post

From the Publisher

Both these novels follow protagonist Nathan Zuckerman through different times in his life-Ghost Writer, dubbed a "glowing work of fiction" by LJ's reviewer (LJ 9/1/79), introduced the character in his youth, while 1981's Unbound offers him in his mid-30s. Roth's many fans will be happy to see these again.

Library Journal

Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power—the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale—is superb.”

Washington Post

Arguably Philip Roth’s best novel…In The Ghost Writer, published in 1979, Mr. Roth found the virtually perfect balance for the themes that have long obsessed him, most notably the tension between being a loyal Jewish son, in terms of both family and community, and being an unfettered creative writer.”

New York Times

I had only to read the two opening sentences to realize that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller.”

New York Review of Books