“This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away an...”
Work
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk". American Pastoral won the **Pulitzer Prize** in 1998. Seven years later, the novel was included in **Time's List of the 100 Best Novels**, a list covering the period between 1923 and 2005. In 2006, it was one of the runners-up to Toni Morrison's Beloved, in the "**What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years**?" contest held by the New York Times Book Review. ---------- Also contained in: [American Trilogy 1997-2000](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17489174W)
Quotes
Showing 1-4 of 4
Philip Roth
Canonical work source
“This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die--the argument with them drops away an...”
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sa...”
“That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the...”
“Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”