American Pastoral
About this book
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk".
American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. Seven years later, the novel was included in Time's List of the 100 Best Novels, a list covering the period between 1923 and 2005. In 2006, it was one of the runners-up to Toni Morrison's Beloved, in the "What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?" contest held by the New York Times Book Review.
Also contained in: American Trilogy 1997-2000
American trilogy · 3 books
In publication order- American Pastoral 1997 This book
- I Married a Communist 1998
- The Human Stain 2000
Subjects
- american fiction (fictional works by one author)
- anglo-american literature
- bombings
- domestic fiction
- facelift surgery
- family relations
- fathers and daughters
- fiction
- fiction, general
- historical fiction
- history
- jewish americans
- jewish businesspeople
- literary fiction
- marines
- open_syllabus_project
- pastoral fiction
- social conditions
- social life and customs
- suspense & thriller
- vietnam war