American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk".
American Pastoral won the **Pulitzer Prize** in 1998. Seven years later, the novel was included in **Time's List of the 100 Best Novels**, a list covering the period between 1923 and 2005. In 2006, it was one of the runners-up to Toni Morrison's Beloved, in the "**What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years**?" contest held by the New York Times Book Review.
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Also contained in:
[American Trilogy 1997-2000](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17489174W)
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection *Goodbye, Columbus,* which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller *Portnoy's Complaint.* Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history *The Plot Against America.*
