I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.
In his heyday as a star--and as a zealous, bullying supporter of "progressive" political causes--Ira marries Hollywood's beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling expos that identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow."
In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth--who
Commonweal calls the "master chronicler of the American twentieth century--has written a brilliant fictional protrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when the anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 11/02/1999
ISBN: 9780375707216
Pages: 336
Weight: 0.63lbs
Size: 7.94h x 5.32w x 0.73d
Award: Ambassador Book Awards - Winner
Award: International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - Nominee
Review Citations: New York Times 11/21/1999 pg. 78
Entertainment Weekly 12/10/1999 pg. 102
New York Times 12/05/1999 pg. 104
Newsweek 10/01/2007 pg. 80
New York Times Book Review 03/16/2014 pg. 14