ABOUT
THE BOOK

Seymour “Swede” Levov, a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, the prosperous inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory, comes of age in thriving triumphant post-war America. But the Swede is not allowed to remain blissful inside the beloved hundred-and-seventy-year-old stone farmhouse where he lives with his pretty wife, the college sweetheart and former Miss New Jersey, and his lively, precocious daughter who is the apple of his eye. Everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s, and his daughter grows up to be a revolutionary terrorist bent on destroying her father’s paradise. Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933, and now lives in Connecticut. He has written twenty-two books, and with his last three, written in the 1990s, he has won the three major American literary awards (National Book Critics Circle, PEN/Faulkner, and the National Book Award).