The Pilot against America: Stamps, Airmail, and History in The Plot Against America

This article provides a close reading of two commemorative stamps in The Plot Against America (2004) and makes the case that the historical perspective developed in this novel is richer and more complex than it at first appears. The second stamp, the one commemorating Lindbergh’s famous flight, suggests that aviation, and the communication revolution that both produced and emerged from Lindbergh’s flight, has as much interest for Roth as the anti-Semitism and Holocaust counterfactual imaginings that is the ostensible subject of the novel. The meaning of the commemorative stamps resides in their formal structure as much as in what they represent.