Henry Roth (February 8, 1906 – October 13, 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer who found success later in life after his 1934 novel Call It Sleep was reissued in paperback in 1964.
[1] Although his parents never agreed on the exact date of his arrival in the United States, it is most likely that he and his mother landed at Ellis Island and began his life in New York in 1908.
[1] Call It Sleep sold slowly and poorly, and after it was out-of-print, critics writing in magazines such as Commentary and Partisan Review kept praising it, and asking for it to be reprinted.
But Roth's growing ideological frustration and personal confusion contributed to a profound writer's block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the earliest drafts of Mercy of a Rude Stream (although material written much earlier than 1979 was also incorporated into this later work).
There, Roth worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor.
In 1968, after Muriel's retirement from the Maine state school system, the couple moved to a trailer home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, closer to where Roth had stayed as writer-in-residence at the D. H. Lawrence ranch outside of Taos.
Muriel began composing music again, while Roth collaborated with his friend and Italian translator Mario Materassi to put out a collection of essays called Shifting Landscape, published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1987.
After Muriel's death, in 1990, Roth moved into a ramshackle former funeral parlor and occupied himself with revising the final volumes of his monumental work, Mercy of a Rude Stream.
[5] Published in 1934, Call It Sleep centers on the turbulent experiences of a young boy, David Schearl, growing up in the Jewish immigrant slum of New York's Lower East Side in the early 20th century.
[6] Fran Lebowitz, writer and public intellectual, in her Netflix special "Pretend It's a City" speaks about how you can still appreciate the art of an individual separate from his actions.
At the suggestion of Weil and Roth's literary executor, Lawrence Fox, Davidson edited "Batch 2" into An American Type, which was published by W.W. Norton in 2010.
[9] Both a love story and a lamentation, the novel opens in 1938, and reintroduces us to Ira Stigman of the Mercy cycle, a thirty-two-year-old "slum-born Yiddle" eager to assimilate but traumatized by his impoverished immigrant past.
Restless with his lover and literary mentor, English professor Edith Welles, Ira journeys to Yaddo, where he meets M (who only appeared in the old man's reveries in the Mercy series), a blond, aristocratic pianist whose "calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance" engages him.
The ensuing romantic crisis, as well as the conflict between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon his paramour's Greenwich Village apartment and set out with an illiterate, boorish Communist on a quest for the promise of the American West.
Purchasing a small farm, and surrounded by Yankee neighbors, Roth questions his identity as a Jew and struggles to wrest a living out of a Maine countryside where the soil is so hard that he has to dynamite in order to lay pipe deep enough to avoid the winter freezes.
The extreme cold that he and his family endured, his work logging, bargaining over antiques and livestock with neighbors, and the world of backwoods and village America form the principal and unlikely drama of these pages.
Sexually abhorrent acts such as incest, infidelity, and predation, for instance, inform much of his work, as does a more general climate of violence or abuse, often inflicted on others and masochistically turned inwards.