Background
The Human Stain is set in 1998 in the United States, during the period of President Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings and scandal over Monica Lewinsky. It is the third of Roth's postwar novels that take on large social themes.
In 2012, Roth said publicly that his inspiration for the novel was based on an event in the life of his friend Melvin Tumin, a "professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years."
Read more about this topic: The Human Stain
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