3M said, "There are some Pulitzers that are set in these states, but I have no idea if the setting is integral to the book: New Jersey -
American Pastoral by Philip Roth (I don't like Roth, but it’s a Pulitzer) ...
Independence Day by Richard Ford (Pulitzer)."
In
American Pastoral by Philip Roth, 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 citizens, it seems, get 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. The apple of his eye, that is, until she grows up to be a revolutionary terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise.
American Pastoral presents a vivid portrait of how the innocence of Swede Levov is swept away by the times — of how everything industriously created by his family in America over three generations is left in a shambles by the explosion of a bomb in his own bucolic backyard.
Independence Day is essentially an internal monologue, set on the long July 4th weekend of 1988. In this sequel to
The Sportswriter, the protagonist is Frank Bascombe, a divorced, well-educated former sportswriter who now makes his living selling real estate in the affluent New Jersey town of Haddam, while supplementing his earnings with a couple of rental properties he owns in the town's African American neighborhood. While Frank is trying to give his disinterested son a civics lesson on the meaning of Independence Day, Paul feigns confusion and asks a question or two, which Frank knows were really meant to mock him. Paul delights at ridiculing the hall of fame.
In American Pastoral by Philip Roth, 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 citizens, it seems, get 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. The apple of his eye, that is, until she grows up to be a revolutionary terrorist bent on destroying her father's paradise. American Pastoral presents a vivid portrait of how the innocence of Swede Levov is swept away by the times — of how everything industriously created by his family in America over three generations is left in a shambles by the explosion of a bomb in his own bucolic backyard.
Independence Day is essentially an internal monologue, set on the long July 4th weekend of 1988. In this sequel to The Sportswriter, the protagonist is Frank Bascombe, a divorced, well-educated former sportswriter who now makes his living selling real estate in the affluent New Jersey town of Haddam, while supplementing his earnings with a couple of rental properties he owns in the town's African American neighborhood. While Frank is trying to give his disinterested son a civics lesson on the meaning of Independence Day, Paul feigns confusion and asks a question or two, which Frank knows were really meant to mock him. Paul delights at ridiculing the hall of fame.
