Overview

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * From one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century--a compulsively readable elegy for America's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss, and "one of Roth's most powerful novels ever" ( The New York Time s). A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years Here is Philip Roth's masterpiece, featuring Nathan Zuckerman and the story of Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager--a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of domestic terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, American Pastoral gives us Philip Roth at the height of his powers.

Categories

Awards

• New York Times Editors' Choice 1997
• National Book Critics Circle Awards 1997
• Pulitzer Prize 1998

Professional Reviews

Reader Reviews for American Pastoral : American Trilogy 1 (Pulitzer Prize Winner)