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Description edit see section history

Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences. It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “(...) and thus have postponed learning what his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along: of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”
    narrator
  • “Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?”
    narrator (mis)quoting Bertrand Russell

First Sentence edit see section history

About two and a half months after the well-trained divisions of North Korea, armed by the soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th parellel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark named for the city's seventeenth-century founder.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Under Morphine
Out from Under
Historical Note

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in Nemeses: Short Novels. (standard series)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Philip Roth (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Country: United States
Publication Date: September 16, 2008
ISBN: 9780547054841
Page Count: 233

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PS3568 .O855 I53
  • Dewey: 813.54

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