Book Information

Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past. And it's not the secret of Coleman's alleged racism, which provoked the college witchhunt that cost him his job, and, to his mind, killed his wife.
Coleman's secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out, after Coleman's suspicious death in a car crash with his mistress, to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unravelled.
Set in 1990s America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Roth's trilogy of post-war American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation's fate as by the 'human stain' that so ineradicably marks human nature.