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When She Was Good

Part of Vintage International

Author Philip Roth
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Paperback
$20.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Jan 31, 1995 | 320 Pages | 9780679759256
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In this funny and chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and the subject is the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, Lucy Nelson, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness" is a terrible disease. Since seeing her alcoholic father thrown in jail when she was a child, Lucy has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself.
© Nancy Crampton
PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018. View titles by Philip Roth

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In this funny and chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and the subject is the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, Lucy Nelson, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness" is a terrible disease. Since seeing her alcoholic father thrown in jail when she was a child, Lucy has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself.

Author

© Nancy Crampton
PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018. View titles by Philip Roth

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