Seymour "Swede" Levov-a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory-comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even the most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall-of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. For the Swede is not allowed to stay forever blissful inside the beloved hundred - and- seventy-year-old stone farmhouse, in rural Old Rimrock, where he lives with his pretty wife-the college sweetheart who was Miss New Jersey of 1949-and the lively, precocious daughter who is the apple of his eye, that is until she grows up to be a revolutionary terrorist.