American Pastoral

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.

For the Swede is not allowed to stay forever blissful inside the beloved hundred-and-seventy-year-old stone farmhouse where he lives with his pretty wife – the college sweetheart who was Miss New Jersey of 1949 – and the lively precocious daughter who is the apply of his eye. The apple of his eye, that is, until she grows up to be a revolutionary terrorist bent on destroying her father’s paradise.

Full of insight, sharp ironic twists and wisdom about American idealism, ‘American Pastoral’ is a profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche of the last 50 years.

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.