American Pastoral – Roth Philip (2016)

In this novel, Philip Roth offers an elegy for all the twentieth century’s promises of prosperity, civic order and domestic bliss. His protagonist is Seymour “Swede” Levov, a legendary high-school athlete, devoted family man and hardworking inheritor of his father’s prosperous Newark glove factory, who comes of age in a thriving, triumphant post-war America. Then, in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him. His adored daughter Merry grows from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager capable of an outrageously savage act of political terrorism. Overnight, Swede is torn from the longed-for American pastoral and thrust into an indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable and driven by sorrow, rage and deep compassion for its characters, the novel is Roth’s masterpiece. In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the Gold Medal in Fiction, the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, and the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005, The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004. Roth later received the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and in 2011 he won the International Man Booker Prize. He is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.