Henry Roth Biography and List of WorksBooks by Henry Roth | Shop used books at Biblio.com  American author, whose best-known work CALL IT SLEEP (1934), is considered a classic of Jewish-American literature. Critical reaction to the novel was positive, but as a result of the Depression, Roth's publisher went bankrupt and the book disappeared from view. In 1960 it was reissued and recognized as an important novel of the 1930s.
"... no one has ever distilled such poetry and wit from the counterpoint between maimed English and the subtle Yiddish of the immigrant. No one has reproduced so sensitively the terror of family life in the imagination of a child caught between two cultures."
(Leslie A. Fiedler) Henry Roth was born in Tysmenica, Galicia, Austria-Hungary. His father was a waiter. Roth moved with his mother to New York in 1907, where his father was already living. From 1908 to 1910 the family lived in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. In 1910 they moved to the Lower East Side, and four years later to Harlem. Roth graduated from the City College of New York. During his college years he started to write. Eda Lou Walton a poet and professor of English literature, with whom he lived in her Greenwich Village house, encouraged Roth. There he met such writers as Hart Crane and Margaret Mead. Call It Sleep received moderate critical success but soon went out of print and was forgotten. The story records six years in the life of a Jewish immigrant boy, David Schearl, in a New York ghetto just prior to World War I. David is shielded by his loving mother, but his life turns in a nightmare when his paranoid father is unable to hold a job. David's father is tormented by his lack of success and he becomes increasingly hostile towards his son, finally convincing himself that David is not his son. After he has survived a deathly initiation game, David closes his eyes, with his mother beside him, and "one might as well call it sleep." Call It Sleep was among one of the first novels to introduce the interior monologue into American literature. The reader learns about the world of the immigrants' Lower East Side from the boy's vantage point - David's Oedipal conflicts and his encounters with anti-Semitism on the streets, neighbourhood gangs of non-Jewish youths, and an early introduction to sex, which terrifies David. Roth uses dialect, broken, misspelled English, the mispronounced words of the street boys, the dialects of Irish policeman and Italian street sweeper, and the language of David's mind.  The novel was dismissed by the leftist New Masses as 'introspective and febrile.' Roth had joined the Communist Party in 1933, but found that he could not write in the true spirit of class struggle. As a consequence, Call It Sleep was not praised for its social criticism. Roth was more concerned with the psychological development of his characters, Freud's ideas, and linguistic considerations. However, the novel has been hailed by some critics as one of the finest examples of the proletarian novel, although Roth did not particularly focus on the sufferings of the working class.
Roth later stated in interviews that he suffered from both the political pressures on his writing and from his life with Walton, who was much older, and gave him literary and financial support during the Depression. Roth believed that because of this experience he never gained independence and could never get beyond the level of the talented protégé in his writing. After his first novel Roth started his second, an autobiographical work, but quickly destroyed it. He published no more novels until 1994, going through a very long writer's block. During this period Roth worked in numerous professions including precision metal grinding, psychiatric nursing, poultry farming, and teaching. Roth married Muriel Parker in 1939. From 1946 he has lived in Maine and New Mexico. In the late 1960s Roth once again began writing and received a grant from the American Academy. He held the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship at the University of New Mexico, living on the Frieda Lawrence ranch in Taos during his tenure. In 1987 Roth published a collection of short stories. The first volume of his second novel, MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM, appeared in 1994. Written over many years and fusing disparate material, this multi volume work was received with mixed reviews. In DRIVING ROCK ON THE HUDSON (1995) Roth used observations from his own life and continued the story of the tortured hero Ira Stigman. Roth died on October 1995, and the third volume of the intended six-volume series, less autobiographical FROM BONFDAGE, was published posthumously in 1996. For further reading: 'The Most Undeservedly Neglected Books of the Past Twenty-five Years' by L. Fiedler and A. Kazin, in American Scholar, 25 (1956); 'Henry Roth's Neglected Masterpiece' by L. Fiedler, in Commentary (1960); Henry Roth by Bonnie Lyons (1976); Studies in American Jewish Literature 5 (1979, special issue on Henry Roth); New Essays on Call It Sleep, ed by Hana Wirth-Nesher (1996) - Other forgotten writers from the 1930s who have been found again later: Nathanael West, Daniel Fuchs, Edward Dahlberg, John Peale Bishop, Jack Conroy, Tess Slesinger, Nelson Algren, Meyer Levin, Albert Halper. Free shipping on select books. No minimum purchase
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