The Great American Novel

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Philip Roth's 1973 comic novel about the Ruppert Mundys, a homeless baseball team in the fictional Patriot League during the Second World War, narrated by an aging sportswriter named Word Smith. With most good players away at war, the Mundys field a team of misfits and lose almost every game, and the league's history becomes a satire of American myths, patriotism and the Red Scare.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”