The Human Stain

The Human Stain
Philip Roth
New York: Berkley, 2021
Rare Book Collection
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

Phillip Roth (1933-2018) was an award-winning American novelist and short story writer. His novel The Human Stain is an example of racial passing featured in twenty-first-century literature. Roth’s novel explores issues of identity and self-presentation. The book’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman, a recurrent character in Roth’s novels, tells the story of his neighbor, an aging classics professor named Coleman Silk, who requested Zuckerman to write his biography after a series of tragedies in his career and personal life

Zuckerman learns, after Silk’s death, that the professor has been passing as a white man, claiming Jewish heritage, for over fifty years. The book is written with Zuckerman possessing this knowledge, evident in the author’s use of past tense. He looks back at their interactions, comparing what he has discovered to the self-constructed narrative Silk provided at the beginning.