18 Facts About Henry Roth

Henry Roth 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.

Henry Roth lived there until 1927, when, as a senior at City College of New York, he moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and New York University instructor who lived on Morton Street in Greenwich Village.

In 1938, during an unproductive sojourn at the artists' colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, Henry Roth met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer; much of this period is depicted in Henry Roth's final work, An American Type.

Henry Roth severed his relationship with Walton, moved out of her apartment, and married Parker in 1939, to the disapproval of her family.

Henry Roth did not initially welcome the success of the 1964 reprint of Call It Sleep, valuing his privacy instead.

Muriel began composing music again, while Henry 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.

Henry Roth failed to garner the acclaim some say he deserves, perhaps because after the publication of Call It Sleep he failed to produce another novel for 60 years.

Henry Roth attributed his massive writer's block to personal problems, such as depression, and to political conflicts, including his disillusionment with Communism.

Lonoff in Philip Henry Roth's Zuckerman novels, is a composite of Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud and fictional elements.

Henry Roth describes an incestuous relationship between Stigman and his cousin, Stella.

Henry Roth was able to revise both the third and fourth volumes in 1994 and 1995 with the help of his assistant, Felicia Steele, shortly before his death.

The majority of these pages are about Henry Roth's move to Maine, afraid that his associations with the Communist Party would haunt him at his factory job in Massachusetts.

Henry Roth's writing centers on immigrant experience, particularly a Jewish-American experience in Depression-era America.

Henry Roth has been hailed as a chronicler of New York City life.

Henry Roth's work reveals an obsession with cultural depravity: the internal dislocation of the intellectual and of society at large that features so prominently in the work of the greatest Modernist writers.

Indeed, Henry Roth often fixates on human depravity in a multitude of forms.

Henry Roth won the 1987 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

From Bondage was cited by the National Book Critics Circle as being a finalist for its Fiction Prize in 1997, and it was in that same year that Henry Roth won the first Isaac Bashevis Singer Prize in Literature for From Bondage, an award put out by The Forward Foundation.