Roth, Henry

(US, 1906–95)

Apart from a collection of short stories, Roth's only published work for sixty years was his autobiographical novel Call It Sleep (1934). This remarkable work tells the story of David, the son of Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side of New York. The novel is linguistically rich; although on the one hand it is an often comic depiction of a vanished world, it is also the story of a young man growing up among family mysteries and feuds. In 1944 Roth published the first two volumes of a sequence of autobiographical novels; a posthumous novel, From Bondage, which also drew on his own experiences, appeared in 1995.

James Joyce, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Mark Twain  SV