Roth American Trilogy

About American Pastoral

Philip Roth's American Pastoral (1997) is the Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel in his American Trilogy — a devastating examination of the American Dream's disintegration through Seymour 'the Swede' Levov, a high school sports hero who builds a perfect American life and watches it destroyed when his daughter becomes a domestic terrorist in the Vietnam era. The trilogy — completed by I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000) — uses Nathan Zuckerman as its narrator to examine three decades of American political catastrophe: the 1960s, the McCarthy era, and the Clinton years. American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; The Human Stain, which examines race, identity, and political correctness, is widely considered equally accomplished. Together they constitute the most searching examination of American political life in late twentieth-century fiction.