The Plot Against America

The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004, and an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency.

The narrator and central character is the young Philip, and the care with which his confusion and terror are handled makes the book as much a story about growing up as one about American politics. Roth based the novel on the isolationist ideas Lindbergh had espoused in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee, and on his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey. The family is Jewish, and the novel's subject is the way antisemitism becomes more acceptable in American life as the administration changes. The narrator is a child, and the family's ordinary routines are what the invented history is measured against.

The book was praised for the realism of its invented world and for its treatment of the period, and it belongs to the small group of novels in which a plausible change to one election is followed through to its domestic consequences.