When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

Overview

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral comes a funny, chilling novel set in a small town in the 1940s Midwest, featuring a young woman whose moral goodness may destroy her.

"High, careful tragedy, nasty as life, and Roth emerges ... as a Dreiser who can write!" —Stanley Elkin

When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679759256
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/31/1995
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.65(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

"High, careful tragedy, nasty as life, and Roth emerges ... as a Dreiser who can write!" —Stanley Elkin

"Roth is a living master." —Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

Roth is a living master.”

New York Review of Books