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American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, an all-around good guy whose life is ruined by the "indigenous American berzerk". The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and was included in All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels. The film rights to it were later optioned by Paramount Pictures. In 2006, it was one of the runners' up in the "What is the Greatest Work of American Fiction in the Last 25 years?" contest held by the New York Times Book Review [[1]] Image File history File links American_pastoral. ...
Philip Roth Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey) is an American novelist. ...
The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...
The Three Graces, here in a painting by Sandro Botticelli, were the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and fertility in Greek mythology. ...
Pre-Colonial America For details, see the main Pre-Colonial America article. ...
A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended, generally fictional narrative in prose. ...
Vintage Books was founded in 1954 by Alfred A. Knopf as a trade paperback home for its authors. ...
See also: 1996 in literature, other events of 1997, 1998 in literature, list of years in literature. ...
I Married a Communist is a Philip Roth novel concerning the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, known as Iron Rinn. ...
Philip Roth Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933, Newark, New Jersey) is an American novelist. ...
In Norse mythology, Berserkers (or Berserks) were warriors who fought naked, in an uncontrollable rage or trance of fury, the berserkergang. ...
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded since 1948 for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. ...
1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ...
The All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels was a list published by TIME magazine in 2005 of the greatest ever English-language pieces of literature published since TIME was founded in 1923. ...
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American motion picture production and distribution company, based in Hollywood, California. ...
The New York Times is an internationally known daily newspaper published in New York City and distributed in the United States and many other nations worldwide. ...
The framing device employed in American Pastoral is a 45th high school reunion attended by frequent Roth alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman. There he meets former-classmate Jerry Levov ("Swede" Levov's younger brother) who describes to him the tragic course of Seymour's adult life. The rest of the story consists of Zuckerman's posthumous recreation of Seymour Levov's story, based upon Jerry's testimony, a few newspaper clippings and Zuckerman's own impressions after two brief run-ins with "the Swede" towards the end of Levov's life. In these two run-ins we learn that Seymour has remarried, has three young children - while the daughter Merry, from his first marriage, - the one who ruined his previous life - is not mentioned. In Zuckerman's reimagining of Seymour's life this second marriage has no part; it ends in 1974 with Watergate unrolling on TV while the previous lives of all protagonists completely fall apart. A high school reunion is a gathering of persons who have gone to high school together. ...
Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character who has appeared as the narrator or protagonist of (and often functions as an alter ego in) many of Philip Roths dozen or so works of fiction published since the late 1970s. ...
The term Watergate scandal refers to a series of events, spanning from 1972 to [[1974], that gained its name from burglaries of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.. Though then-President Richard Nixon had endured two years of mounting political embarrassments...
Plot introduction Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow. Levov is born and raised in Newark, New Jersey the son of a successful Jewish-American glove manufacturer. Called "the Swede" because of his anomalous blond hair, blue eyes and Nordic good looks, he is a star athlete in three sports and narrator Nathan Zuckerman's idol and hero. "The Swede" eventually takes over his father's glove factory -"Newark Maid"- and marries Dawn Dwyer, an Irish-American Miss New Jersey 1949 winner (the actual winner this year was Kathleen Crowley). Nickname: The Brick City Map of Newark in Essex County Coordinates: County Essex Founded/Incorporated 1666/1836 Mayor Cory Booker, term of office 2006–2010 Area - City 67. ...
A Jewish American (also commonly American Jew) is an American (a citizen of the United States) of Jewish descent or religion who maintains a connection to the Jewish community, either through actively practicing Judaism or through cultural and historical affiliation. ...
The Miss New Jersey USA competition is the pageant that selects the represetative for the state of New Jersey in the Miss USA pageant. ...
Kathleen Crowley (born December 26, 1931) was a blonde American actress who specialized in being phenomenally seductive in TV series and movies. ...
Levov establishes what he believes to be a perfect American life with a beloved family, a satisfying business life, and a beautiful old home in rural, Republican New Jersey. Yet as the Vietnam War and racial unrest wrack the country and destroy inner-city Newark, Seymour's teenage daughter, whose only flaw has been a stutter, becomes angry and fat and increasingly radicalized joining the far left radical organisation 'The Weathermen'. Levov's "pastoral" life implodes in a devastating act of violence that changes everything. Combatants Republic of Vietnam United States Republic of Korea Thailand Australia New Zealand The Philippines National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam Democratic Republic of Vietnam People’s Republic of China Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea Strength US 1,000,000 South Korea 300,000 Australia 48,000...
A race riot or racial riot is an outbreak of violent civil unrest in which race is a key factor. ...
Major themes Though Roth has re-used ideas and characterizations from his own body of work before, American Pastoral contains perhaps his most blatant act of "self-plagiarisation". In it he has Seymour Levov's father, Lou, complain bitterly about his friends' anti-Black animosity (steming from the destruction of their businesses and neighborhoods during Newark's race riots): An African American (also Afro-American, Black American) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ...
Fires started in the 1967 Newark riots destroyed a significant area of the city. ...
- "I'm by the pool and my wonderful friends look up from the papers and they tell me they ought to take the schvartzes and line 'em up and shoot 'em. And I'm the one who has to remind them that's what Hitler did to the Jews. And you know what they tell me, as an answer? 'How can you compare schvartzes to Jews?'"
- (p 164)
Compare it to this passage from The Professor of Desire (also spoken by the protagonist's father): This is a list of words and phrases used by speakers whose English has been heavily influenced by Yiddish, especially speakers of Yinglish. ...
The Professor of Desire is a 1977 novel by Philip Roth (* 1933). ...
- "And, tell me, what could make a difference with those ignorant bigots? At least let them hear what someone else thinks of them! Jewish people so full of hatred that they go out and vote for a George Wallace- it's beyond me. Why? People who have lived and seen a whole life-time as a minority, and the suggestion that they make in all seriousness is that they ought to line up the colored in front of machine guns and let them have it. Take actual people and mow them down... I tell them, look at Mr. Barbatnik- ask him if that isn't the same thing that Hitler did with the Jews. And you know what their answer is, grown men who have raised families and run successful businesses and live in retirement now in condominiums like supposed civilized people? They say, 'How can you compare niggers with Jews?'
- (p. 235)
Governor George Wallace (in front of door) standing defiantly against desegregation while being confronted by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach at the University of Alabama in 1963. ...
A minority or subordinate group is a sociological group that does not constitute a politically dominant plurality of the total population of a given society. ...
Nigger is a term used to refer to dark-skinned peoples, especially Africans or Negroids. ...
Quotes - "But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you're getting your way as a god" (p. 5).
- "I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface" (p. 23).
- "And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people... ? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again" (p. 35).
- "The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy--that is every man's tragedy" (p. 86).
- "And then the loss of the daughter, the fourth American generation, a daughter on the run who was to have been the perfected image of himself as he had been the perfected image of his father's father ... the angry, rebarbative spitting-out daughter with no interest whatever in being the next successful Levov, flushing him out of hiding as if he were a fugitive—initating the Swede into the displacement of another America entirely, the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of Utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede's castle and there infecting everyone. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral—into the indigenous American berserk" (p. 86).
- "The authority of beauty is a very irrational thing" (p. 385).
- "The old system that made order doesn't work anymore. All that was left was his fear and astonishment, but now concealed by nothing" (p. 422).
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