American Pastoral

This masterpiece is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity and civic order. The protagonist is 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 post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. For Swedes adored daughter, Merry has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a 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.