American Pastoral

New to Vintage Classics, this is the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exposed the American psyche. Still profoundly resonant today, it confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.

‘A tragedy of classical proportions…a magnificent novel’ The Times

Discover the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers.

‘Swede’ Levov is living the American dream.

He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, lucrative business, sporting prowess and good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving, post-war America, land of liberty and hope.

Until one sunny day in 1968, when Swede’s daughter, Merry, commits an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism and the Levov family is plunged into mayhem. Extraordinarily nuanced and poignant, American Pastoral is the first in an eloquent trilogy of post-war American novels that still resonates today.
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PRAISE FOR AMERICAN PASTORAL-
‘Angry, grieving, witty, acute’ Sunday Times
‘A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years’ Financial Times
‘A momentous novel’ Observer
‘Utterly tragic and compelling’ Tatler

Author Biography

Philip Roth was one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. He attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, receiving a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.

In 1959, Roth published his first book Goodbye, Columbus for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success. Roth was the author of thirty-one books through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Roth’s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five.