“My mother grew up on the Lower East Side, in the same tenement building as Ethel…They went to the same high school.” These were not things you told people during those times. The Putnam family is sympathetic to the Rosenbergs and has a personal tie to Ethel. Two weeks after he returns from Harvard, Simon sits with his parents and watches the news surrounding the execution of the Rosenbergs. Simon is in awe of professor Crowley, explaining that when he sat through his lectures “I felt that I was hearing the answer to a question that I hadn’t known enough to ask.” After his rejection from the University of Chicago, Simon has no choice but to return home to his parents in Coney Island. Despite a reference from his renowned professor Robertson Crowley, Simon is rejected from a graduate program in Norse literature at the University of Chicago. Simon Putnam narrates the story and has just graduated from Harvard with a degree in Folklore and Mythology. The novel, in many but not all ways, revolves around the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953. “The Vixen” is a sort of coming of age story that takes place in the 1950s, during America’s struggle to assess its morality in the McCarthy era.
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