Annotation
"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 postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizens, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. 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, in rural Old Rimrock, 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 apple 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." "American Pastoral presents a vivid portrait of how the innocence of Swede Levov is swept away by the times - of how everything industriously created by his family in America over three generations is left in a shambles by the explosion of a bomb in his own bucolic backyard."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Awards
1997 New York Times Editors' Choice
1998 Pulitzer Prize
Characters
| Name | Levov, Seymour "The Swede" |
| Gender | Male |
| Traits | Married |
| Father | |
| Name | Levov, Merry |
| Gender | Female |
| Trait | Fugitive |
| Genre | Tragedy Literary Fiction |
| Topics | Accidental deaths Fugitives American history Protests 1960s culture |
| Setting | Newark, New Jersey Old Rimrock, New Jersey Rural Stone farmhouse |
| Series | ||
| Postwar trilogy | ||
| 1 | American pastoral | |
| 2 | I married a communist | |
| 3 | The Human stain | |