American Pastoral

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE“One of the five best novels I have ever read, maybe the best. . . . It ranks with the greatest of American fiction." —Stephen King, The New York Times“An incandescent fiction. . . . Scintillates with more Rothian wit, paradox, eloquent tantrums, and absurd pitfalls than can be counted." —Los Angeles Times Book Review“The greatest of great American novels.” —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times“Widely considered to be Roth's masterwork."—EsquireAmerican Pastoral is an elegy for the American century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth’s protagonist is 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 outlandish act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the American berserk.