The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

PHILIP ROTH (1933–2018) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 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” and Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. Roth also received two of PEN’s 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.