As an academic novel, a novel set in the context of a university or college campus and involving academic personnel, The Human Stain has many precedents including Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, David Lodge's Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, Jane Smiley's Moo, Saul Bellow's The Dean's December, and Bernard Malamud's A New Life. If one categorizes The Human Stain as mainly a "Jewish" novel, then, of course the work of Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud must be considered as must also Roth's own work since these three are arguably the "big three" of twentieth-century Jewish novelists.

Roth characterizes The Human Stain as the third and final novel (when taken together with American Pastoral and I Married A Communist) in a trilogy, though some critics cannot see much in them that would make a "trilogy." The three novels do, how ever, explore a pervasive and continuing...