American Anti-Pastoral: Brookside, New Jersey and the Garden State of Philip Roth

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 Roth’s protagonist S...