This is a first edition of Philip Roth's 1997 novel which Roth described with the two following novels as a loosely connected "American trilogy". Each of these novels treats aspects of the post-war era against the backdrop of a nostalgically remembered Jewish American childhood of Nathan Zuckerman. Roth's fiction often explored the human need to demolish, to oppose, to pull apart. In this book he focuses on the counterforce: the longing for an ordinary life. Seymour "Swede" Levoy - 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. 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. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium ove