Private needs and public acts are inextricably joined... with disastrous consequences. Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold): Newark roughneck, radio actor, idealistic Communist, and educated ditch digger turned popular performer. A six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making the world a better place and instead winds up blacklisted, unemployable, and blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. His life is in ruins. On his way to political catastrophe he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent film star, Even Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll to a dispiriting soap opera of tears and treachery. Eve's dramatic revelation to gossip columnist Briden Grant of her husband's life of "espionage" for the Soviet Union soon spirals their relationship from private drama into national scandal. I Married a Communist is an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive-fierce and funny, eloquently rendered, and deadly accurate.

Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, the son of American-born parents and the grandson of European Jews who were part of the nineteenth-century wave of immigration to the United States.  He grew up in the city's lower-middle-class section of Weequahic and was educated in Newark public schools.  He later attended Bucknell University, where he received his B.A., and the University of Chicago, where he completed his M. A. and taught English. Afterwards, at both Iowa and Princeton, he taught creative writing, and for many years he taught comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania.  He retired from teaching in 1992