American Pastoral Characters

Aww, c'mon guys. Don't call him Skip.Nathan Zuckerman is a famous novelist and a character in eight other Philip Roth novels as of this writing. In the last of these, Exit Ghost, Zuckerman mee...

"The Swede" (1.1) is the first sentence of American Pastoral, which is a big ol' clue that the Swede is our hero, the guy who carries the story on his shoulders. The Swede is a high school and col...

From potential Miss America to Mean Mommy to Pioneer Woman cattle farmer to Mad Woman suicide-watch to Jezebel adulteress, Dawn runs the gambit of female stereotypes. This ain't surprising—we see...

Merry is one of literature's ultimate outsiders and one of the most heartbreaking figures we've ever read. And that's saying a lot: we've read a bunch of totally depressing books. A bunch.Our first...

Jerry's rallying cry is "the Swede, the Swede, the Swede"—he's the Jan Brady to the Swede's Marcia.But Jerry is also an explosive hotshot cardiac surgeon who lives in Miami, and he is the Swede's...

Rita Cohen is high up on the Most Outrageous Characters Ever list. She's sinister, malicious, and perverse. This tiny, young woman will say anything. Her social filter is in serious need of replace...

Lou is the Swede's dad. He's the dang paterfamilias. He taught the Swede most of what he knows about the leather industry and is the founder of Newark Maid. Lou is a second generation American and...

Sylvia Levov is the Swede's mother. She's a traditional housewife and seems to be a kind and loving woman. Interestingly, she's the family member who seems to find it most natural to talk about Mer...

Jim is Dawn's father. He's a working class guy, first a milkman and then a plumber. When he has a heart attack, Dawn enters the Miss New Jersey pageant to try to win scholarship money for her broth...

Dorothy is Dawn's mother. We don't know much about her relationship with Dawn. She's a devout Catholic, and she isn't able to connect with Sylvia the way Jim does with Lou. As a result of spending...

If Zuckerman hadn't gone to his forty-fifth high school reunion in 1995, he might never have run into Jerry, and might never have learned of Merry, and never imagined the secret life of the Swede....

Here's the opposite of Rita Cohen (a character who may or may not be real even within the confines of the novel within American Pastoral): Angela Davis. This is a real person, an influential figure...