I Married a Communist

A New York Times Notable Book

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and i [...]
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A New York Times Notable Book

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.

In his heyday Ira marries Hollywood's beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that openly identifies him as a Communist spy and saboteur.

In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth has written a brilliant fictional protrayal of that treacherous post-war epoch when the anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.



"A bitter, often funny, always engrossing story--. What I Married a Communist tells us above all is that Philip Roth is very much with us as a writer, every bit as contemporary and vital as he was when he began."--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

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

"I Married a Communist is filled with passages as fine and sharp as anything Roth has ever written (which is to say, as fine and sharp as anything in contemporary American literature)."--The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"I Married a Communist leaves you--both dumbfounded and in awe."--Chicago Sun-Times

"[S]eals [Roth's] reputation as a writer at the very top of his game."--The Philadelphia Inquirer