{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019374068554396422, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.647058823529412, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Bobbie Ann Mason and Philip Roth: Two Great-American-Novel Concepts Pieced in One Big Picture

My purpose in this essay is to place Philip Roth's American Pastoral in a context broader than that of the urban New Jersey milieu for which he is generally known. By contrasting this work with the two major novels of Bobbie Ann Mason, I weave together Roth's delineation of the rise and fall of the industrial northeast with Mason's saga of a similar period in the rural agricultural mid-south. In this way a total picture emerges of America's rise and decline in the period of the twentieth century through the aftermath of the Vietnam War—with some surprising similarities.