American Pastoral

“One of the five best novels I have ever read, maybe the best. . . . It ranks with the greatest of American fiction." —Stephen King, The New York Times

“An incandescent fiction. . . . Scintillates with more Rothian wit, paradox, eloquent tantrums, and absurd pitfalls than can be counted." —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“The greatest of great American novels.” —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times

“Widely considered to be Roth's masterwork."—Esquire

American Pastoral is an elegy for the American century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth’s protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school who grows up in the booming postwar 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.

For Swede’s adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandish act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the American berserk.