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A collection of original essays on Philip Roth offering contemporary critical readings and assessments of recent texts.

Could World War I have been averted if Franz Ferdinand and his wife hadn't been murdered by Serbian nationalists in 1914? What if Ronald Reagan had been killed by Hinckley's bullet? Would the Cold War have ended as it did? In Forbidden Fruit, Richard Ned Lebow develops protocols for conducting robust counterfactual thought experiments and uses them to probe the causes and contingency of transformative international developments like World War I and the end of the Cold War. He uses experiments, surveys, and a short story to explore why policymakers, historians, and international relations scholars are so resistant to the contingency and indeterminism inherent in open-ended, nonlinear systems. Most controversially, Lebow argues that the difference between counterfactual and so-called factual arguments is misleading, as both can be evidence-rich and logically persuasive. A must-read for social scientists, Forbidden Fruit also examines the binary between fact and fiction and the use of counterfactuals in fictional works like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America to understand complex causation and its implications for who we are and what we think makes the social world work.

Has anyone ever worked harder and longer at being immature than Philip Roth? The novelist himself pointed out the paradox, saying that after establishing a reputation for maturity with two earnest novels, he \"worked hard and long and diligently\" to be frivolous--an effort that resulted in the notoriously immature Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Three-and-a-half decades and more than twenty books later, Roth is still at his serious \"pursuit of the unserious.\" But his art of immaturity has itself matured, developing surprising links with two traditions of immaturity--an American one that includes Emerson, Melville, and Henry James, and a late twentieth-century Eastern European one that developed in reaction to totalitarianism. In Philip Roth’s Rude Truth--one of the first major studies of Roth’s career as a whole--Ross Posnock examines Roth’s \"mature immaturity\" in all its depth and richness.

Not very many novels’ publications are preceded by an open letter from the author directing audiences how to read—and not to read—the upcoming work. It is far easier to think of examples of authors responding to and correcting their critics—recall Maxine Hong Kingston to her many ethnographic readers¹—than of writers preempting certain interpretations. But when Philip Roth wrote in advance ofThe Plot Against Americathat “Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman à clef to the present moment in America. That would be a mistake,” the warning was prescient

This paper examines Philip Roth's most Holocaust-haunted novel: The Plot Against America . Through a comparative intertextual study of Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo (published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz ), Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl , and Roth's Plot —and through an analysis of the other references to Frank and Levi in Roth's writing—this article argues that The Plot Against America should be read considering the profound impact of these works on Roth. It further argues that Plot is not merely Roth's counterfactual novel about what America would have looked like in the early 1940s had a president who sympathized with the Third Reich assumed control of the United States government. It is Roth's imagined Holocaust memoir, the one which the contingencies of history spared him from having to write as an actual witness, but which he nonetheless chose to write after having been profoundly impacted by his friendship with (and profound esteem and empathy for the works of) Primo Levi.

In The Plot Against America (2004), Philip Roth offers an alternative history in which Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator, defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 election. Although some critics, and Roth himself, have previously argued against reading the Lindbergh administration in Plot as an allegory for contemporary politics, I recuperate this novel as a lens for contextualizing the 2016 election season and results. By drawing parallels between Roth's President Lindbergh and President-elect Donald Trump, I demonstrate that Roth's Lindbergh, like Trump, gains public support by invoking a malevolent version of group identity that tends to reemerge in the American political arena, in an imagined 1940s America and in 2016.

According to this view, historical truth cannot be encapsulated in any single monologic master narrative, but must be sought through a plurality of factual and fictional narratives that reveal the multiplicity of experiences that constitute our nation's histories. According to Roth's theory, any truthful representation of a historical moment must include the innumerable possible outcomes inherent in that moment, whether or not they came to fruition.

[...]although African Americans are only briefly mentioned, slavery and racial prejudice against blacks are in the background from the very beginning, when Sandy draws an Arbor Day poster that is inspired by a commemorative stamp but includes a meaningful addition, namely a black boy \"to provide the poster with a social content that implied a theme by no means common in 1940\" (27). In calling attention to this, the specific fictional mode Roth employs aims to shed light on issues that have been reified by public discourse; alternative history proves to be an effective instrument to illuminate the omissions and falsehoods of institutionalized narratives. [...]the author rewrites history and repeatedly does so in concentric circles: history is newly interpreted in the novel itself and, within this fictional world, in Philip's stamps as he sees them in his nightmare, completely nazified.6 Roth's counterfactual historical investigation rushes to its end in the conclusive pages, where events are listed as items in a cold chronology, or as in a war bulletin. \"Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear\" (1)-Philip confesses in the novel's incipit-consequently Lindbergh's disappearance in not enough, and re-establishing a battered democracy is not enough, because what happened once could happen again. [...]bearing in mind the plight of Native Americans, African Americans, or Japanese Americans interned in camps during World War II, how bitterly ironic do Lindbergh's reported words sound when he justifies himself for being too soft on American Jews, as \"guarantees embedded in the U.S. Constitution, combined with longstanding American democratic traditions, made it impossible for a final solution to the Jewish problem to be executed in America\" (387-88). [...]not only does this shift allude to the mingling streams of life and art the author constantly experiments with, it also embodies the blurred boundaries between different temporal levels and areas of experience: the potentialities buried in the past rise again to threaten the present and the future.