American Pastoral
Philip Roth (1997)
“The most American of fathers raises the most American of daughters — and she builds a bomb.”
At a Glance
Nathan Zuckerman narrates the story of Seymour 'Swede' Levov — a golden Newark athlete who inherits his father's glove factory, marries a beauty queen, and builds an idyllic life in the New Jersey countryside. Then his daughter Merry bombs a post office to protest the Vietnam War and kills a man. The Swede's entire pastoral world — the dream itself — collapses from the inside.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1998. Widely considered Philip Roth's masterpiece and one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century's second half. It inaugurated Roth's 'American Trilogy' (continued by I Married a Communist and The Human Stain) and established the template for the late-career novel that diagnoses the entire American project through a single family's catastrophe.
Diction Profile
High literary register with working-class and immigrant specificity — Latinate complexity coexisting with the vocabulary of manufacturing, sports, and Newark neighborhoods
Moderate but concentrated