American Pastoral

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEA Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years"An incandescent fiction.... American Pastoral scintillates with more Rothian wit, paradox, eloquent tantrums and absurd pratfalls placed at the exit of each irresistible argument that can be counted.... He strikes a vivid blaze." --Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThe first book in the brilliant American Trilogy of postwar set novels, American Pastoral dissects the American dream during the social upheaval of the 1960s and is widely considered to be one Philip Roth's masterpieces.Seymour "Swede" Levov--a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory--comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok, including his beloved daughter Merry, who commits an outlandish act of political terrorism. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history.With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. It's a book about wanting to belong--and refusing to belong--to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral--a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement--against the American Berserk.

PHILIP ROTH (1933-2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 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" and the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six-year history of the prize to win it twice.In 2005 Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2012 he won Spain's highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013 he received France's highest honor, Commander of the Legion of Honor.