Henry Roth author page

Henry Roth biography

Henry Roth (1906–1995) was a novelist whose early life included years on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and, from 1914, Jewish Harlem. His best-known work is Call It Sleep, a novel about immigrant life in New York that was published in 1934.

Call It Sleep was Roth’s first novel. The book returned to wider attention when it was published in paperback in 1964, after having dropped out of sight during the Depression years.

Roth later wrote the Mercy of a Rude Stream sequence, a fictional quartet centred on Ira Stigman. His posthumous novel An American Type was edited by Willing Davidson and published in 2010.