American Pastoral Book

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction 1998 American Pastoral is perhaps Philip Roth’s masterpiece. Slipping into his Zuckerman sequence (briskly followed by I Married a Communist in the following year), the novel charts the slow-motion destruction of a once-ideal life. Narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, American Pastoral focuses on Seymour "Swede" Levov, the son of a successful glove manufacturer whose business he eventually inherits. Handsome, wealthy, his story is the American Dream made real. However, all that is shattered by the political radicalisation of his daughter, a girl outraged by the horrors of the Vietnam war. To his abject horror, her role in an act of extreme, home-turf terrorism rips his life apart: American Pastoral unpicks that downfall, the Swede’s story partly seen through the prism of his younger brother Jerry and Zuckerman’s own encounters with this most tragic of figures. Sweeping in the political anarchy and sadness of post-Vietnam America, Roth vividly captured the end of a certain innocence, when 60s idealism was swept aside by dark and unstoppable forces.

Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheriter of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder.

Seymour Levov a devoted family man and inheritor of his father's factory comes of age in thriving post-war America. His daughter Merry is the apple of his eye until America begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s and Merry grows up to be a terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise.