It is 1998 the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president & in a small New England town an ageing classics professor Coleman Silk is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie but the real ruth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife his four children his colleagues & his friends including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silks secret & sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent upright man esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life & to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unravelled. & to understand also how Silks astonishing private history is in the words of the Wall Street Journal magnificently interwoven with the larger public history of modern America.