American Pastoral

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.

He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, a character in many of Roth's novels.

American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in TIME's List of the 100 Best Novels.

The film rights to it were later optioned, though a film version was not made until 2016.

American Pastoral is a 2016 American crime-drama film directed by Ewan McGregor and written by John Romano, based on the 1997 novel of the same name by Philip Roth.

The framing device in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who is the narrator. Called "the Swede" because of his anomalous blond hair, blue eyes and Nordic good looks, Seymour is a star athlete in high school; a two-year veteran of the Marine Corps; and the narrator Nathan Zuckerman's idol and hero.

He reintroduced Zuckerman as witness and narrator in a trilogy of historical novels: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), set in the period from the 1960s into the 1990s.

Seymour Irving Levov is born and raised in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, in 1927 as the elder son of a successful Jewish American glove manufacturer, Lou Levov, and his wife Sylvia.

Author Philip Roth grew up on Summit Avenue, graduated from Weequahic High School in 1950, and many of his novels (such as American Pastoral, Nemesis) are set there.

The framing device in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who is the narrator.

The Swede eventually takes over his father's glove factory and marries Dawn Dwyer, a former beauty queen from nearby Elizabeth, whom he met in college.

Elizabeth is the hometown of Mary Dawn Dwyer Levov, the principal female character in Philip Roth's 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel American Pastoral.

American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in TIME's List of the 100 Best Novels.

It refers to the 1967 Newark riots, the Watergate scandal, the sexual revolution and Deep Throat, the code name of the secret source in the Watergate scandal and the title of a 1972 pornographic film.

The riots were depicted in the 1997 Philip Roth novel American Pastoral as well as its 2016 film adaptation, directed by and starring Ewan McGregor, alongside Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning.

The inspiration for the Levov character was a real person: Seymour "Swede" Masin, a legendary all-around Jewish athlete who, like the Levov character, attended Newark's Weequahic High School.

In the late 1990s, Masin attracted much attention, thanks to Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel American Pastoral (1997).

The lines of the "motto" which appear in the novel ("We are against everything that is good and decent in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mothers' nightmares.") allude to a speech by John Jacobs at a Weathermen "war council" in December 1969.

In the fiction novel American Pastoral by Philip Roth, the daughter of the central character appears to be a member of the Weather Underground.

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. Seymour Irving Levov is born and raised in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, in 1927 as the elder son of a successful Jewish American glove manufacturer, Lou Levov, and his wife Sylvia.

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. Seymour Irving Levov is born and raised in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey, in 1927 as the elder son of a successful Jewish American glove manufacturer, Lou Levov, and his wife Sylvia.

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".

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".

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".

The framing device in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who is the narrator.

The framing device in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, who is the narrator.

After Seymour's teenage daughter Merry, in 1968, set off a bomb in protest against American involvement in the Vietnam War, killing a bystander, and subsequently went into hiding, Seymour remained traumatized for the rest of his life.

The rest of the novel consists of Zuckerman's posthumous recreation of Seymour's life, based on Jerry's revelation, a few newspaper clippings, and Zuckerman's own impressions after two brief run-ins with "the Swede," in 1985 and shortly before Seymour's death from prostate cancer, at age 68, in 1995.

It refers to the 1967 Newark riots, the Watergate scandal, the sexual revolution and Deep Throat, the code name of the secret source in the Watergate scandal and the title of a 1972 pornographic film. In Zuckerman's reimagining of Seymour's life, this second marriage has no part; it ends in 1973 with Watergate unraveling on TV while the previous lives of the protagonists completely disintegrate.

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.

Called "the Swede" because of his anomalous blond hair, blue eyes and Nordic good looks, Seymour is a star athlete in high school; a two-year veteran of the Marine Corps; and the narrator Nathan Zuckerman's idol and hero.