I Married a Communist

I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditchdigger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, both as a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950s.<P>In his heyday as a star -- and as a zealous, bullying supporter of "progressive" political causes -- Ira marries Hollywood's beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling expose that identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow".<P>In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth -- who Commonweal calls the "master chronicler of the American twentieth century" -- has written a brilliant fictional portrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.