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 post-war America. But everything he lost when the country begins to run amok in the tubulent 1960s. 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 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. The apple of his eye, that is, until she grows up to be a revolutionary terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise.