American Pastoral - Tapa dura

Philip Roth's fiction has often explored the human need to demolish, to challenge, to oppose, to pull apart. Now, writing with deep understanding, with enormous power and scope and great storytelling energy, he focuses on the counterforce: the longing for an ordinary life. Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant, postwar America. He has a beautiful wife - Miss New Jersey 1949 - and a lively, precocious daughter, Merry. She is the apple of his eye until America begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s and Merry grows up to be a revolutionary terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise. With vigorous realism, one of America's most esteemed writers takes us back to the conflicts and violent transitions of the 1960s. This is a book about loving - and hating - America. It's a book about wanting to belong- and refusing to belong - to America. It sets the desire for an American pastoral - a respectable life of space, calm, order, optimism, and achievement - against the indigenous American berserk.

With his last three books, each of them published in the 1990s, Philip Roth has won three majorliterary awards. In 1991, for Patrimony, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1993, for Operation Shylock, he won the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1995, for Sabbath's Theater, he won the National Book award. Mr. Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1993. He was educated at Bucknell Univerisity and the University of Chicago. Since 1972 he has lived in Connecticut. American Pastoral is his twenty-second book.