The Human Stain

The Human Stain is a novel by the American writer Philip Roth, published in 2000. It is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a writer of sixty-five who has appeared in several earlier Roth novels, and it is set in western Massachusetts in the late 1990s.

Coleman Silk is the protagonist: a former professor and dean of the faculty at Athena College, a fictional institution in the Berkshires, where he still lives after retiring. In 1996 he wonders aloud whether two students who have missed every class are spooks, meaning that they have vanished, and the insult he is accused of is one he did not know he was making because he had no idea the two were black.

Zuckerman is largely an observer, and the story of what happened to Silk is revealed slowly, along with the far larger thing about his life that he has kept to himself. The novel was a national bestseller, and it forms a loose trilogy with American Pastoral and I Married a Communist, both of which appeared before it.

It was adapted as a film of the same name in 2003, directed by Robert Benton.