convincing.” Inspiration Roth stated that the idea for the novel came to him while he was reading the unpublished galleys for Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s autobiography in which Schlesinger makes a comment that some of the day's more radical Republican senators wanted Lindbergh to run against Roosevelt. The title appears to be taken from The Plot Against America: Senator Wheeler and the Forces Behind Him, a communist pamphlet written by David George Plotkin, published in support of the campaign against Burton K. Wheeler's re-election to the US Senate in 1946. The novel depicts an antisemitic United States in the 1940s. Roth had written in his autobiography, The Facts, of the racial and antisemitic tensions that were a part of his childhood in Newark. Several times in that book, he describes children in his neighborhood being violently attacked simply because they were Jewish. Reception Roth's novel was generally well received. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post, exploring the book's treatment of Lindbergh in some depth, calls the book "painfully moving" and a "genuinely American story." The New York Times review described the book as "a terrific political novel" as well as "sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible." Blake Morrison in The Guardian offered high praise: "The Plot Against America creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond skepticism and with a quotidian attentiveness to sights and sounds, tastes and smells, surnames and nicknames and brandnames—an accumulation of petits faits vrais—that dissolves any residual disbelief." Writer Bill Kauffman, in The American Conservative, wrote a scathing review of the book and objected to its criticism of the movement of which Lindbergh was a chief spokesperson, which is sometimes referred to as isolationist but Kauffman sees as antiwar, in contrast to Roosevelt's pro-war stance. He also criticizes its portrayal of increasing American antisemitism, in particular among Catholics, and for the nature of its fictional portrayals of real-life characters like Lindbergh, claiming it was "bigoted and libellous of the dead," as well as for its ending, featuring a resolution to the political situation that Kauffman considered a deus ex machina. Many took the novel as something of a roman à clef for or against the George W. Bush administration and its policies, but though Roth was opposed to the Bush administration's policies, he denied such allegorical interpretations of his novel. In 2005, the novel won the James