The Plot Against America: A Novel – An Award-Winning Historical Fiction of the 1940 Election and Jewish Family Survival

by Philip Roth

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

“It's not a prophecy; it's a nightmare. . . . [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle.” —The New Yorker

“Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving. . . .Far and away the most outward-looking, expansive. . . book Roth has written." —The Washington Post Book World

“A terrific political novel. . . . sinister, vivid, dreamlike. . . creepily plausible." —The New York Times Book Review

“Ambitous and chilling . . . a breathtaking leap of imagination. . . . The writing is brilliant.”
—USA Today

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 threatens to destroy his small, safe corner of America—and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.

Genres: Fiction

480 pages, Paperback

Published June 30, 2026

About the author

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2005, the Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after Eudora Welty. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague.

Reviews

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alternate history that assumes Lindburgh won the 1940 Presidential Election, told from the point of view of a Jewish tween living in a Jewish area of Newark. Roth couldn't think of a good ending, so what he provided was only somewhat satisfactory, and even that ending is telegraphed fairly early in the novel

[Linda Schuler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to HarperCollins Publ and goodreads' giveaways, I was able to enjoy Roth's The Plot Against America: prophetic in many ways, echoes of the past, and highly provocative--timely for America's current situation.

Unique, quite brilliant, highly creative, and quite entertaining (I laughed aloud at times). I was stunned by the way Roth put together the possible dramas, the what if/one-off concepts... a different person here or there, slightly different timeline, different place, one important detail difference, or the possible unexpected happenings.

Quotes that ring true in today's America for me (taken from pages 233, 268, 273, 310, 376, and 377:
...every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn't see it with my own eyes I'd think I was having a hallucination..... this is the way Hitler did it... start with something small, and if they get away with it... if no one...raises a cry of alarm.... how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds by the fascist... right marching under the sign of the cross and flag.... I will continue crying 'fascism' to every crowd of Americans...until pro-Hitler party of treason is driven from Congress on Election Day.... But what our homegrown Hitlerites cannot take away is my love for America...my love for democracy...my love for freedom.... What they cannot take away--unless the gullible and the sheepish and the terrified are patsies enough to return them to Washington one more time--is the power of the ballot box.... There's a plot afoot...and I'll gladly name the forces propelling it--hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear. What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings.... To have enslaved America with this hocus-pocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!