La Tache
However, Roth himself dispels this and stated that he had not known of Broyard's ancestry when he started writing the book and only learned of it months later. In Roth's words, written in "An Open Letter to Wikipedia" and published by "The New Yorker": "Neither Broyard nor anyone associated with Broyard had anything to do with my imagining anything in "The Human Stain"." As stated above, Roth clarifies that Coleman Silk was inspired "by an unhappy event in the life of [Roth's] late friend Melvin Tumin."