Review
`utterly tragic and compelling. It's one of the greatest modern American novels.'
-- Tatler
-- Tatler
Book Description
'Marvellous...raging and elegiac' James Wood, Guardian
Product Description
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. 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. (20040927)
From the Back Cover
'A magnificent novel' The Times
Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, grows up in the booming post-war years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. His teenage daughter has become capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism, wrenching Swede out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American beserk.
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--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.About the Author
In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 received 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 has twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005, Philip Roth will become the third living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013. (19970917)
