Henry Roth’s “An American Type” His Early Novel “Call It Sleep” Was His “Ulysses.” His Late Work “An American Type” Is His “Grapes Of Wrath”
Los Angeles Times
All novelists, despite the façade of fiction, are ultimately writing variations of their own stories. Surely their characters provide necessary cover, but there's always autobiography and memoir yelping in the background ? "it's all true, the names have changed, but the emotions and memories are dead-on."
Henry Roth, the first of the great Jewish American novelists of the 20th century, never concealed the background that shaped him or the emotions that often left him guilt-ridden and paralyzed. His first book, "Call It Sleep," widely regarded as a masterpiece and perhaps America's first modernist novel, is also a testament to the squalid, hermetic Jewish life of New York City's Lower East Side, where Roth spent his immigrant childhood.
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