Henry Roth

American · 1906 to 1995

Born on February 8, 1906, in Tysmenitz, then in Austro-Hungarian Galicia and now in western Ukraine, Henry Roth landed with his mother at Ellis Island in 1908 and grew up in the Lower East Side and then in Harlem. He was a senior at the City College of New York in 1927 when he moved in with the poet and NYU instructor Eda Lou Walton, fifteen years his senior, in Greenwich Village. Under her patronage he began Call It Sleep around 1930. The novel, finished in 1934, follows a small Jewish boy, David Schearl, through the noise of the tenement streets, the violence of his father, the embraces of his mother, and a transfiguring shock of light at a streetcar track. It sold poorly. He signed a contract with Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's for a second novel, broke under it, and lost the next sixty years to writer's block. He married the pianist Muriel Parker in 1939, became a tool-and-gauge maker, then a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant, and a waterfowl farmer in Maine, where the family settled in 1946. The paperback reissue of Call It Sleep in 1964, championed by Irving Howe in the New York Times Book Review, sold over a million copies and made him a name again at fifty-eight. After Muriel's death in 1990 he moved into a converted funeral parlour in Albuquerque and wrote at last the four-volume autobiographical sequence Mercy of a Rude Stream, the first volume appearing in 1994. He died of natural causes in Albuquerque on October 13, 1995, at eighty-nine.