The Human Stain (A Novel)

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

“By turns unnerving, hilarious, and sad…. It is a book that shows how the public zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual’s life.” — The New York Times

The third book in the brilliant American Trilogy of postwar American lives—Nathan Zuckerman recounts the life a classics professor at a small New England college whose personal history mirrors “the larger public history of modern America" (Wall Street Journal).

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret. 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 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 unraveled.