The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
ISBN: 978-1400079490
To tell the story of Lindbergh's presidency from the point of view of my own family was a spontaneous choice. To alter the historical reality by making Lindbergh America's 33rd president while keeping everything else as close to factual truth as I could-that was the job as I saw it. . . . It also gave me an opportunity to bring my parents back from the grave and restore them to what they were at the height of their powers in their late 30's . . . and then to go ahead to imagine how they might have conducted themselves under the enormous pressure of a Jewish crisis such as they never really had to encounter as native-born New Jerseyans, living all their lives, luckily enough, without an Aryan white supremacist in the White House. I've tried to portray them here as faithfully as I could-as though I were, in fact, writing nonfiction.
-Philip Roth, The New York Times, 19 September 2004
Philip Roth, considered by many to be one of America's greatest contemporary novelists, creates this disturbing tale of "what if?" What if Charles Lindberg, national hero, described as a "rabid isolationist, Nazi sympathizer and crypto-fascist" was elected president in the 1940 election instead of FDR? This alternative history novel is told from the semi-autobiographical perspective of seven-year-old Philip, growing up with his family in the predominantly Jewish Weequahic section of Newark.
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