American Pastoral

American Pastoral is a 1997 novel by the American writer Philip Roth. It is the first book of the trilogy he completed with I Married a Communist and The Human Stain.

Seymour Levov, called the Swede, is a Jewish-American glove manufacturer and a former high school athlete from Newark whose life followed the pattern he expected of it: marriage, a family business, and a house in the countryside. Roth approaches him through Nathan Zuckerman, a writer from the same neighbourhood who is trying to understand how Levov's daughter became involved in the political violence of the period and what her actions did to the household. The turmoil of the decade arrives inside one family, and the novel describes it as a form of American frenzy rather than as something external to the country.

Roth sets a single family's crisis against the history of Newark and of the post-war United States, and Zuckerman's attempt to write another person's life becomes part of the book's subject. The two novels that follow, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain, return to the same neighbourhood in later decades.