num_pages: 432
description: Pulitzer Prize Winner (1998)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' Levova legendary high school athlete a devoted family man a hard worker the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factorycomes 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 teenagera 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. Compulsively readable propelled by sorrow rage and a deep compassion for its characters this is Roth's masterpiece.
language: English
title: American Pastoral
publisher: RANDOM HOUSE UK