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Melvin Tumin: the germ of The Human Stain

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The Human Stain: the present as history
Philip Roth Writer
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There was an awful lot of tarring and feathering going on from the Right and from the Left; and… but the tarring and feathering on the Left came to me as political correctness, and on the Right it was, the scapegoat was Clinton, to drive him out of power, to drive the Democrats out of power. So — and this was going on around me — so the challenge for me was to treat the present as history; the history of the present moment. I hadn't done… I hadn't done that before, and so I came up with The Human Stain.

The fame of the American writer Philip Roth (1933-2018) rested on the frank explorations of Jewish-American life he portrayed in his novels. There is a strong autobiographical element in much of what he wrote, alongside social commentary and political satire. Despite often polarising critics with his frequently explicit accounts of his male protagonists' sexual doings, Roth received a great many prestigious literary awards which include a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1997, and the 4th Man Booker International Prize in 2011.

Listeners: Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.

Tags: Democrats, Bill Clinton

Duration: 53 seconds

Date story recorded: March 2011

Date story went live: 18 March 2013