num_pages: 352
description: 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 astonish even his most virulent accuser.Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."
language: English
title: The Human Stain
titlecomplete: The Human Stain (The American Trilogy, #3)
characters: Mark Silk, Steena Palsson, Delphine Roux, Ernestine Silk, Coleman Silk, Herb Keble, Nelson Primus, Nathan Zuckerman, Jeff Silk, Iris Silk, Faunia Farley, Lester Farley, Lisa Silk, Arthur Sussman
genres: Fiction, American, The United States Of America, Americana, Jewish, Literature, Classics, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 40186
places: Massachusetts
series: Complete Nathan Zuckerman, The American Trilogy
awards: awardedAt: 978336000000
name: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: WH Smith Literary Award, awardedAt: 946713600000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Prix Médicis Etranger, awardedAt: 978336000000
name: Koret Jewish Book Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Dublin Literary Award
publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt