American Pastoral

Philip Roth,Philip Roth
Publisher: Mariner Books Classics
May 26 2026
EAN: 9780063499300
ISBN: 0063499304
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Synopsis:

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."--Esquire

American 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.