Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our 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 outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

"Dazzling...a wrenching, compassionate, intelligent novel...gorgeous." Boston Globe

"At once expansive and painstakingly detailed....The pages of American Pastoral crackle with the electricity and zest of a first-rate mind at work." San Francisco Chronicle

"One of Roth's most powerful novels ever...moving, generous and ambitious...a fiercely affecting work of art." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"[M]agnificent....This is Roth's most mature novel, powerful and universally resonant....The picture is chilling." Publishers Weekly

"[E]legiac and affecting....[P]assion seethes through the novel's pages. Some of the best pure writing Roth has done." Kirkus Reviews

"American Pastoral successfully shoulders its weighty public theme of American optimism undone by a propensity for the extreme. It also rounds up Roth's usual subjects — Jewish assimilation, bourgeois pretension and the shiksa's fatal allure....Roth's faithful, often piercing apprehension of the jagged emotional transactions between parent and child form this book's true achievement....Sadly though, this is another novel by a marquee author that suffers from intimidated or inactive editors. There are long sections of conversation...that just go on and on. Structurally, the book is poorly shaped. Roth doesn't circle back to the 90-page preamble featuring Zuckerman, the ending feels arbitrary and the gratifying if bracing payoff that American Pastoral vigorously promises throughout is denied. But, if you want a Philip Roth book that isn't just another bulletin from his life, this one is that and more." Albert Mobilio, Salon.com

"Roth is a masterly prose stylist...and there are many passages of fine language....But these strengths are indulged in a way that becomes the book's weakness. The abstracted treatment of ideas, the weighty, morally serious exposition, result in a novel that holds its material at arm's length from the reader." Ralph Lombreglia, The Atlantic Monthly

"Pastoral...is well crafted with vivid, crisp prose, but unlike [other Roth novels], it's empty....Once again, no one escapes the misery that personifies modern America." Ted Leventhal, Booklist

"Roth doesn't tell the whole story blow by blow but gives us the essentials in luminous, overlapping bits. In the end, the book positively resonates with the anguish of a father who has utterly lost his daughter. Highly recommended." Library Journal

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