American Anti-Pastoral

One of the best-known novels taking place in New Jersey, Philip Roth’s 1997  American Pastoral  uses the fictional hamlet of Old Rimrock, NJ as a microcosm for a nation in crisis during the cultural upheavals of the 1960s-70s. Critics have called Old Rimrock mythic, but it is based on a very real place: the small Morris county town of Brookside, New Jersey. American Anti-Pastoral  reads the events in Roth’s novel in relation to the history of Brookside and its region. While R