Tidox Books
Cover of American Pastoral

Nominee · National Book Critics Circle Awards 1997

American Pastoral

by Philip Roth

1997 novel by Philip Roth

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.

Synopsis from Open Library.

Language
English
Pages
432
ISBN
9780547415970
Subjects
facelift surgery, Vietnam War, Marines, Jewish Americans, History, Pastoral fiction, Anglo-American literature, Historical fiction

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