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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
ISBN-100395860210
ISBN-139780395860212
eBay Product ID (ePID)329510
Product Key Features
Book TitleAmerican Pastoral
Number of Pages448 Pages
LanguageEnglish
TopicGeneral, Literary
Publication Year1997
GenreFiction
TypeTextbook
AuthorPhilip Roth
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1.4 in
Item Weight26 Oz
Item Length9 in
Item Width6 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN96-049368
ReviewsRoth's canvas is at once expansive and painstakingly detailed...The pages of American Pastoral crackle with the electricity and zest of a first-rate mind at work., "Roth has chronicled the rise and fall of one man's fortunes and in doing so created a resonant parable of American innocence and disillusion . . . A fiercely affecting work of art." -- Michiko Kakutani
Dewey Edition22
Dewey Decimal813.54
Edition DescriptionTeacher's edition
SynopsisAmerican 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. 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 citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. With vigorous realism, Roth takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving - and hating - America. It's a book about wanting to belong - and refusing to belong - to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral - a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement - against the indigenous American Berserk.
I think this may be Roth's best novel, it is the best one I have read at least. The prose is stunning and the characterizations so bleakly real they hurt.