Roth, Henry

Roth, Henry (1906?–), novelist. Brought to New York City from Austria when he was 18 months old, Roth grew up on the Lower East Side, in poverty but withal enjoying a sense of community he was never to find later. At City College he published a sketch called Impressions of a Plumber in the college paper. It brought him to the attention of Eda Lou Walton of the English Department faculty. Roth began living with Walton in 1928, and the works of O'Neill, Eliot, and especially Joyce provided him narrative techniques to deal with the material of his childhood. The result was a major and to‐be‐influential work, Call It Sleep (1934). Published in the depth of the Great Depression, the novel got some good reviews but was attacked by the influential left as lacking “social realism” and “proletarian awareness.” It went almost immediately out of print, until the critics Leslie Fiedler and Alfred Kazin called attention to it in the late '50s, prompting the publication of a paperback edition in 1964 that was heralded by Irving Howe in a front‐page New York Times Book Review piece. Call It Sleep was at last fully recognized and became a popular success—over a million copies sold, many translations, a place in some college courses. It is generally conceded to be the best of all U.S. Jewish ghetto novels. But for more than 50 years Roth never wrote another. In 1987 he published a slight second book of short writings, Shifting Landscapes, some of the pieces from his youth. Leonard Michaels, a professor at Berkeley, reported in 1993 that Roth had completed five books of a multi‐volume autobiographical novel with the overall title Mercy of a Rude Stream; the first volume, A Star Shines Over Mount Morris Park, was published in 1994.