Roth's novel The Plot Against America (2004) is an alternative history that imagines what the United States would have been like, especially for Jews, if the Nazi sympathizer, Charles A. Lindbergh, who became a national hero after flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election.

Doris Lessing's short novel The Fifth Child (1988) presents a situation that in some respects is not unlike what happens to Swede and Dawn in American Pastoral. In this novel set in England in the 1960s, Harriet and David Lovatt raise a large family. Their lives are perfect until the birth of their fifth child, who is altogether strange and brings anxiety and confusion into their lives as they try to cope with him through childhood and adolescence.

Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction...