2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

The Winner:

Philip Roth
The Human Stain

The public scandal that brings down Coleman Silk hides the more surprising secrets he has kept from everyone, including his friends and family. But as the narrator reconstructs the biography of this an aging classics professor in a small New England town, we are given a look at how a man invents a life and how it can all fall apart in a scandal-obsessed society.

"By turns unnerving, hilarious, and sad.... It is a book that shows how the public zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual's life.... Not only a philosophic bookend to American Pastoral but a large and stirring book as well." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Philip Roth received the 1960 National Book Award in fiction for Goodbye, Columbus. He has twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award: in 1987 for the novel The Counterlife and in 1992 for Patrimony. Operation Shylock won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was chosen by Time magazine as the best American novel of 1993. In 1995, Roth's Sabbaths Theater received the National Book Award in fiction. In 1998, he received the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral and was a White House recipient of the National Medal of Arts. His other books include the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound; the novels Letting Go, My life as a Man, and The Professor of Desire; and the political satire Our Gang.

The five finalists for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction:

Denis Johnson, The Name of the World

Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Mona Simpson, Off Keck Road

Millicent Dillon, Harry Gold

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The PEN/Faulkner Award is the largest annual juried prize for fiction in the United States. The award winner receives $15,000 and each of the four nominees receives $5,000.

The judges—Cristina Garcia, James D. Houston, and Lily Tuck— considered approximately 275 novels and short story collections by American writers published in the U.S. during the 2000 calendar year from over 70 publishing houses, including small and academic presses.

The winner will be announced in April. The five authors will be honored during the 21st Annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Visit www.penfaulkner.org for more information.