About this item
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * From one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century - a compulsively readable elegy for Americas promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss, and "one of Roths most powerful novels ever" (The New York Times) . Here is Philip Roths masterpiece, featuring Nathan Zuckerman and the story of 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 fathers glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swedes 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 domestic terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, American Pastoral gives us Philip Roth at the height of his powers.
About the Author
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991) , the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993) , the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995) , and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997) . He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998) ; in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) . In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient." In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003--2004." In 2007 Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.
