Philip Roth's The Human Stain Writing Assignment

Philip Roth’s The Human Stain
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Philip Roth’s The Human Stain
For one to become a very good novel writer and author there are several skills one needs acquired and basic of them all is having superior grammatical knowledge. Furthermore, he/she needs to be very observant and have the ability to connect with his/her readers through his ideas, thoughts and emotions. Philip Roth an American novelist came out through a letter to address a misstatement by Wikipedia discrediting him as a credible source in his own novel, The Human Stain alluding that the novel was inspired from the life of Anatole Broyard another writer (Doctorow, 2012). However, the novelist argued that was not the case and that the novel was indeed about events that happened in the life of one of his friends Melvin Tumin a professor at Princeton College.
The Human Stain is a novel about a university professor who loses his job after racism allegations by the name of Coleman Silk (Doctorow, 2012). The professor, in an attempt to find out the whereabouts of two of his students who had not attended any of his lectures referred to them as “spooks”. Unfortunately this term in America at that time was a degrading designation for black African Americans meant to hurt and demean as much as the word “nigger”. Furthermore, it so happened that the two students were of African American decent hence the hate speech witch hunts that ensued on the professor. The incident forms the basis of the whole novel that proceeds to showcase the professor’s struggles to prove his innocence and unwarranted persecution.
Roth argued that he had been inspired to write the novel from actual events in the life of Professor Melvin. He had known Melvin as a friend and was privy to his times as a civil-rights activist and a champion in racial relations in addition to his publications on political liberations and inequality and also as a professor at Princeton. He embodied him in the main character of Coleman Silk following his unfortunate incident at Princeton College where the professor’s career took a turn for the worst after unknowingly referring to two black students as “spooks”, the very same statement used by Coleman in the novel (Doctorow, 2012).
Novel writing may involve creating a story from imagination otherwise known as fictional writing or writing a novel based on a true story w...