American Pastoral

In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. 

Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levo — a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, and the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory — who comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. 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 political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk.

"The novel has the spaciousness and weight of an epic, a staggeringly successful one... But Roth’s greater triumph here, in what is possibly the finest work of his career, is the thoroughness and intensity with which he plumbs the souls of his characters. One senses he’s not so much writing about them as feeling them, probing every inch of their pain. And yet despite the compassion in his characterizations... Roth’s theme about the fundamental mysteriousness of people is achingly clear. ...It’s breathtaking to witness an author at the height of his very considerable powers writing, as Roth does here, with so much humility and generosity and sorrow.” -  Donna Rifkind, The Washington Post

Philip Milton Roth gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus (winner of 1960's National Book Award), cemented it with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint and has continued to write critically-acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman which began with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and include American Pastoral (1997) (winner of the Pulitzer Prize).  In May 2011, he won the Man Booker Interna