I Married a Communist: A Novel

A National Jewish Book Award Finalist

“A bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and place in our common past….The idealisms and hypocrisies of the postwar period [are] brilliantly resurrected.” —Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books

The second book in the brilliant American Trilogy, I Married a Communist chronicles the rise and fall of a man whose life is destroyed in the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s, a personal tragedy that echoes the broader national betrayal.

Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent-film star, the exquisite Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin).

Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll into a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. And with Eve's dramatic revelation to the gossip columnist Bryden Grant of her husband's life of "espionage" for the Soviet Union, the relationship enlarges from private drama into national scandal.

Set in the heart of the McCarthy era, the story of Iron Rinn's denunciation and disgrace brings to harrowing life the human drama that was central to the nation's political tribulations in the dark years of betrayal, the blacklist, and naming names.

“A bitter, often funny, always engrossing story that wonderfully evokes a time and place in our common past…. The idealisms and hypocrisies of the postwar period [are] brilliantly resurrected.”  - New York Review of Books

“A remarkable work—remarkable in its stringent observation of American life…remarkable in its wisdom. Mr. Roth has the frantic politics of this frantic time—the McCarthy era—in exact pitch.”  - Arthur Schlesinger, The New York Observer

“As social history it breathes life. In Ira Ringold, Roth has created one of his singularly ripe, vigorous characters. Ira’s dizzying rise and fall out of and back into the working class trace the trajectory of twenty years of American history.”  - Chicago Tribune

“Philip Roth is an amazing writer…. I Married a Communist may very well become his classic work; perhaps a classic for all time.”  - Plain Dealer

“I Married a Communist is filled with passages as fine and sharp as anything Roth has ever written (which is to say, as fine and sharp as anything in contemporary American literature).”  - Village Voice Literary Supplement

“I Married a Communist leaves you both dumbfounded and in awe.”  - Chicago Sun-Times

“[S]eals [Roth’s] reputation as a writer at the very top of his game.”  - Philadelphia Inquirer