Historical fiction
The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
Quick take
Philip Roth's alternate history of the 1940s is a deeply disturbing portrait of a dystopian United States.
Good to know
Social issues
Famous author
Unlikeable narrator
Now a movie
Synopsis
In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America—and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.