I Married a Communist

Gripping. . . . A masterly, often unnerving blend of tenderness, harshness, insight, and wit." —The New York Times Book Review

"A bitter, often funny, always engrossing story. . . . The idealisms and hypocrisies of the postwar period [are] brilliantly resurrected." —The New York Review of Books

"Philip Roth is an amazing writer. . . . I Married a Communist may very well become his classic work; perhaps a classic for all time," —The Plain Dealer

I Married a Communist tells of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, who begins life as a teenage ditchdigger in 1930s Newark, becomes a bigtime 1940s radio star, and is destroyed in the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s. In his heyday—when he was a zealous, bullying supporter of “progressive” political causes—Ira marries Hollywood silent-film star Eve Frame. Their honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve’s scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies him as “an American taking his orders from Moscow.”

This story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge is a brilliant portrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch, when anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.