After Roth's death, The New York Times asked several prominent writers to pick their favorite work by Roth, and many picked American Pastoral. Richard Ford, in his response, wrote: "The fusing powers of Roth’s imagination, conviction and raging intelligence are everywhere evident and exhilarating. There is about it a profound and heartening sense (and it is a profound book) that the verbal construction you’re undertaking as a reader represents absolutely the only way this mighty story could ever be brought into existence. American Pastoral stares back at me audaciously unblinking as a great novel. And although such a rambunctious piece of artifice can inevitably not be perfect, it is nonetheless in all its ways right." Stephen King also chose it as his favorite Roth novel, writing: "American Pastoral is one of the five best novels I have ever read, maybe the best. It is muscular storytelling complemented by characters — especially Swede Levov — who burn their way into one’s memory. The scope is relatively small, but the ambition is epic. Few can handle the passing years as well as Roth does here. It ranks with the greatest of American fiction."[6] Harold Bloom named Roth one of the greatest living American authors, alongside Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, naming their respective masterpieces as Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral; Blood Meridian; The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon; and Underworld.[7]
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