During the time of President Clinton's impeachment hearings, Coleman Silk--a classics professor at a small New England college--is undergoing a trial of his own: he has been accused of racism, and his job is in jeopardy. Silk is innocent of the charge, but he is, in fact, guilty of something else--a fact about himself he has kept completely secret for half a century. When Silk's friend (and Philip Roth's perennial hero) Nathan Zuckerman looks into the scandal, he unearths the complicated and stunning truth. Along with AMERICAN PASTORAL and I MARRIED A COMMUNIST, THE HUMAN STAIN is part of (in Roth's words) "a thematic trilogy, dealing with the historical moments in postwar American life that have had the greatest impact on my generation." It won the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was a New York Times "Editors' Choice" for one of the best books of 2000.