American Anti-Pastoral

THOMAS GUSTAFSON is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865. Born and raised in Brookside, he now calls Echo Park in Los Angeles his home.

• List of IllustrationsAbbreviations Prologue Part I Dismal Harmony1 The Office of Letters and the Bomb: Brookside and Old Rimrock2 Fourth of July Parade3 Indigenous American Berserk4 Fig Leaf: The Voice of the Pastoral5 Walled Garden Part II Babel6 All Babel Breaks Loose7 Inside the Territory: Myth and History8 Harmony: Bill Orcutt’s WASP History Tour9 Dissonance: Bucky Robinson’s Jewish History Tour10 Counterfactual: Beatrice and George Jenkins Sr.’s Black History Tour of Morristown11 On the Dead-End Dirt Road: The Quiet Babel of Stoney Hill Road and Where Goodbye Newark Meets Goodbye Orchard12 Brookside Bards: Steven Cramer’s Poetry of Protest and Christopher Merrill’s Poetry of Place Part III Pentecost Remembered and Lost13 Brookside against the Current14 NIMBY: Protecting Green Space with Green Money15 The Price of Harmony16 The Table of Otherhood and Communion17 The Community Club and Its Dissidents18 American Pastoral and Revolutions of the WordEpilogue: “The Great New Jersey Novel”: American Pastoral and the Garden State of Letters AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

“Thomas Gustafson’s American Anti-Pastoral, a study of Philip Roth’s literature through the prism of Brookside, New Jersey, is a well-written, intriguing, and accessible work of literary criticism. It is both an excellent contribution to 'Roth Studies' and at the same time something much more than that, a literary excursus into the relationship between place, myth-making, and literary creativity.” - Michael C. Kimmage (author of In History's Grip: Philip Roth's Newark Trilogy)