American Trilogy books in order

Q: "How many books are in the American Trilogy series?"

"There are four books in the American Trilogy series, published between 1997 and 2000."

Q: "What is the first book in the American Trilogy series?"

"The first book in the American Trilogy series is American Pastoral, published in 1997."

Q: "Do the three novels need to be read in a specific order?"

"They are thematically linked but narratively independent. You can read them in any order, though publication order gives you the intended progression through different decades of American disillusionment."

Reading order

#	Title	Published	Author	Buy on Amazon
1	American Pastoral	1997	Philip Roth	Buy
2	I Married a Communist	1998	Philip Roth	Buy
3	Pata umană	2000	Philip Roth	N/A
4	The Human Stain	2000	Philip Roth	Buy

The American Trilogy is Roth’s most sustained attempt to write about what the twentieth century did to ordinary Americans. Each novel takes a different historical crisis, the 1960s counterculture in American Pastoral, McCarthyism in I Married a Communist, the Clinton impeachment in The Human Stain, and uses it to examine how public events destroy private lives.

American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize and is widely considered the strongest of the three. The Swede, a seemingly perfect American man watching his daughter become a domestic terrorist, is one of Roth’s most fully realized protagonists. The Human Stain, about a classics professor destroyed by a political correctness scandal that conceals a deeper secret about his identity, is nearly as good.

I Married a Communist is the weakest entry by most reader accounts, but all three are worth reading as a sequence if you want to understand how Roth thought about American idealism and its failures.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many books are in the American Trilogy series?

There are four books in the American Trilogy series, published between 1997 and 2000.

What is the first book in the American Trilogy series?

The first book in the American Trilogy series is American Pastoral, published in 1997.

Do the three novels need to be read in a specific order?

They are thematically linked but narratively independent. You can read them in any order, though publication order gives you the intended progression through different decades of American disillusionment.

Reading order#

Frequently Asked Questions

Reading order