American Pastoral Study Guide

Philip Roth was born in 1933 in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. His family was Jewish, and his parents were second-generation immigrants. Roth graduated with a degree in English from Bucknell University and then enlisted in the army, but he was discharged during basic training due to an injury. Roth pursued a PhD in literature at the university of Chicago but dropped out after one term. Much of Roth’s work is semi-autobiographical, with many novels taking place in Roth’s hometown of Newark and involving secular Jewish characters who find themselves at odds with their parents’ more traditional way of life. Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, a work of speculative fiction that imagines a 1940s America in which lauded pilot—and known antisemite—Charles Lindbergh is elected President of the United States, even features Roth and his family as its main characters.  Roth’s fiction also looks critically at life in post-war America. He published his first book, Goodbye Columbus, in 1959, and it won the National Book Award the following year. Roth achieved commercial success with his 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which generated controversy due to its frank and humorously gratuitous depiction of sexuality and masturbation. He created the alter ego Nathan Zuckerman in the late 1970s. Zuckerman appears as a stand-in for Roth in several of Roth’s novels, including American Pastoral. American Pastoral, published in 1997, is the first in a series of books that would come to be called Roth’s American Trilogy. These books examine the impact of significant events from American history on characters’ lives. American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Roth wrote his final novel, Nemesis, in 2010. He died in 2018, at age 85, of heart failure.

American Pastoral follows the events of the Swede’s life from his thriving early adulthood in the 1940s and 1950s to the late 1960s, when the Swede’s daughter Merry’s act of political violence derails his previously happy life. It closes in 1973, as the novel’s characters watch the Watergate scandal unfold. Most notably, the novel focuses on the civil unrest America experienced in the late 1960s as social reform movements gained traction amid a growing campaign against the Vietnam War. Notably, the novel references the 1967 Newark riots, an armed conflict that took place in Newark to protest the city’s racial prejudice against its growing Black population.  Though the city’s Black population had by then become a numerical majority, Black residents of Newark continued to be underrepresented in a corrupt local government. The subsequent riots took place over four days and resulted in around 26 deaths and many injuries. In addition, many store fronts were damaged. At the height of the riots, the National Guard was brought in. The inciting incident of the riots was the arrest and subsequent beating of a Black cab driver named John William Smith, whose brutal assault by police officers was witnessed by residents of a public housing project. When Mayor Robert Addonizio failed to meet the demands that organizers made in response to the incident (suspension of the arresting officers, an investigation into the arrest, and the promotion of the highest ranking Black member of the police to captain), a protest was arranged, which eventually turned violent. Following the riots, much of Newark’s working- and middle-class population fled the city, as did much of its industry. The Newark riots were among more than 150 race riots that took place across across the nation in response to systemic racism against Black Americans in 1967, which came to be known as the “Long Hot Summer of 1967.”

American Pastoral is the first of three books that would come to be known as Roth’s American Trilogy. These works examine how characters’ lives are shaped by significant events from American history. The trilogy’s second book, I Married a Communist, tells of a radio star named Ira Ringold whose life is upended during the McCarthy era, when Ringold’s wife accuses him of harboring anti-American communist sympathies in her book, “I Married a Communist.” The final installation of Roth’s American Trilogy is The Human Stain, which also features Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman as its narrator. The novel tells the story of retired college professor Coleman Silk, who resigns after he is accused of racism following a misunderstanding. As Zuckerman uncovers shocking truths about Silk’s origins, the novel asks questions about the role of identity in American life. Roth’s American Pastoral examines the state of America in the 1960s, when the nation’s anti-communist efforts in South Vietnam developed into a full-scale war that divided the nation. The ongoing fight for civil rights and an increasing number of radical student activists further sowed discord and uncertainty across the nation which had flourished (for some, at least) in the decades after World War II. Other notable works that examine America during this period include Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), a collection of essays largely focused on California in the 1960s. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead takes place in the 1960s and 2010s and centers on the abuse that occurred at the historical Dozier School, a reform school that operated in Jim-Crow era Florida. Finally, American Pastoral references real life academic and activist Angela Davis. Among Davis’s most notable work is Women, Race and Class (1981), an analysis of gender, race, and class through a Marxist lens.