Henry Roth

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Henry Roth (born February 8, 1906 in Galicia, Austro-Hungary - died October 13, 1995, Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States) was an American novelist and short story writer. His first published novel Call It Sleep (originally published in 1934) has achieved some cult popularity since its re-publication and critical re-appraisal in the 1960s when it was hailed by some as an overlooked Depression-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration. Call It Sleep was dedicated to his then mistress and muse, Eda Lou Walton.

After the book's publication, Roth began and abandoned a second novel and wrote several short stories. In the early 1940s he abandoned writing, and moved from New York to Maine and later New Mexico, and worked as a firefighter, laborer, and teacher, among other occupations, before retiring to a trailer park in Albuquerque.

Roth originally didn't welcome the new-found success that "Call It Sleep" received, valuing his privacy instead. However, he soon began to write again, at first short stories. At the age of 73, he began work on a series of novels that grew to six volumes, with final editing completed shortly before his death. The first four of these were published (two of them posthumously) as a cycle called Mercy of a Rude Stream while the last two manuscript volumes remain unpublished.

Roth failed to garner the acclaim some say he deserves, perhaps due to the fact that he failed to produce another novel for sixty years. His massive writer's block after the publication of Call it Sleep is often attributed to Roth's personal problems, such as depression, political conflicts, or his unwillingness to confront events in his past that haunted him, such as having incestuous relationships with both his sister and cousin, which are written about in the later work.