American Pastoral by Philip Roth [FIRST PAPERBACK PRINTING] 1997 • Houghton Mifflin

American Pastoral by Philip Roth

FIRST EDITION TRADE PAPERBACK [1997] HOUGHTON MIFFLIN

First printing. 

Jumbo trade paperback in very good condition with some mild wear to cover.  Reads like new.

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, Here is Philip Roth's masterpiece—an elegy for all the 20th century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss.

Roth's protagonist is 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 post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. 

For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager - a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece. - Bookshop Apocalypse