Henry Roth Papers

Henry Roth was born February 8, 1906 in Tyszmenicz, Galitzia (now the Ukraine). He immigrated with his mother Leah (Farb) to the United States in 1908; Roth’s father, Herman, had arrived in New York City in 1907 and had found work and a home for his family. The Roths lived for a short time in Brownsville before moving in 1910, with Henry's newly born sister Rose (later Broder), to the Lower East Side, then a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. For the next few years, before relocating to Harlem in 1914, young Henry soaked in the sights and sounds of an immigrant culture that would eventually be immortalized in his first novel, Call it Sleep. While still a child, Roth identified himself as a rebel by declaring his atheist beliefs at the age of fourteen. Later in his life he would embrace and discard the Communist Party, become involved in political events and causes, rediscover Judaism, and reveal family shames and secrets cloaked in fiction in the Mercy of a Rude Stream series. But in 1934, at the mere age of twenty-eight, Roth accomplished what some critics call his greatest achievement—he wrote a decidedly sensual novel describing the experiences of a newly arrived immigrant child—Call it Sleep.

In 1924, Roth graduated from De Witt Clinton High School and enrolled in the City College of New York with hopes of becoming a biology teacher. His journals reveal that he won a scholarship to Cornell but “lacked the enterprise to go.” It was at City College that he first encountered literature professor and poet Eda Lou Walton, whom he met through a mutual friend. A professor at New York University and more than a decade older than Roth, Walton captivated the young man and soon the two were living together. She supported Roth both emotionally and financially while he completed his degree in 1928 and wrote Call it Sleep. She continued to do so for another decade until he met his future wife Muriel Parker, and ended his relationship with Walton; unfortunately the relationship ended on a sour note and tensions continued between the two until Walton's death.

Having joined the Communist Party after graduating college, Roth was disillusioned and disappointed when his comrades criticized his work for not being proletarian enough. Despite some favorable reviews of Call it Sleep, Roth continued to write, but virtually abandoned his aspirations to be an author. During the summer of 1938, he met Muriel, a composer, at Yaddo Artists’ Colony in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. They married on October 7, 1939, and Henry began building a resume filled with odd jobs. In the 1940s, he became a precision metal grinder in both New York and New England. Next, he moved to Montville, Maine with his wife and their two sons, Jeremy and Hugh, and began working as an orderly in the Augusta State Hospital—a psychiatric institution—for the next four years. Later he established a waterfowl farming business and tutored Latin and math, lifelong passions, on the side. It was Muriel who supported the family through teaching in a nearby elementary school. Roth’s short stories, such as “Broker” and “Somebody Always Grabs the Purple,” continued to appear in prominent magazines such as The New Yorker. But in the 1940s, despite glowing remarks about his novel in progress, If We Had Bacon, whose opening chapters had been accepted by Scribner’s and printed in Signatures, Roth burned nearly all of his journals and manuscripts in a storm of discontent and discouragement. He proceeded to publish a few short stories in the coming years, but remained successful in dissuading himself of his own writing capabilities.

The 1960s brought great change to Roth’s personal life. He grudgingly relinquished his self-imposed anonymity when Call it Sleep was rediscovered and hailed as “The Great American Novel” by literary critics. He also discarded his long-held Communist ideals and rediscovered his allegiance to Judaism during the Arab Israeli War. And while he had never ceased to write, he began to commit himself more seriously to the art when he accepted the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship in 1968 at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Henry and Muriel Roth moved into the Frieda Lawrence ranch in Taos, New Mexico and the sleeping author awakened. The Roths remained in New Mexico for the remainder of their lives, living in spartan, but comfortable conditions. Roth began to publish short stories and memoirs such as “Itinerant Ithican” and “Kaddish” more frequently. His manuscripts and journals from the 1970s and 1980s indicate the seedlings of the various volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream and the as yet unpublished Maine Sampler.

The 1970s also saw Roth embracing Zionism and traveling to Israel. His topical files and journals indicate a growing interest in the state of Israel and the Zionist cause. In one such entry, Roth writes, “…the [Six Day] war completed his liberation from the Soviet mystique [and] …since moving away from the East Side and its homogeneity…spun a…fresh strand…of affinity…with his people.” He began writing more in his journals about racial tensions both in his neighborhood of Albuquerque and the world at large. Furthermore, the correspondence series contains drafts of letters to President Jimmy Carter as well as an exchange of letters between Roth and Black Panther and ardent Zionist Eldridge Cleaver that documents Roth’s growing concern for political issues.

The once reclusive author also began to grant more and more interviews—especially after he gained world renown with Italy’s 1985 Premio Nonnino prize for Mario Materassi’s translation of Call it Sleep. There is a great deal of correspondence between Roth and Materassi that documents not only their working relationship, but also the father-son relationship which eventually blossomed from it. Roth spent most of his life trying to recapture the inspiration and state of mind that resulted in his first novel, but many of his journal entries ruminate on the writer’s block and depression that plagued him for much of his life. Several of the journal entries throughout the years focus on the same event or chain of events, as if by constantly recreating them he could finally reach a catharsis. Roth addresses these issues and many more in his 1987 monograph Shifting Landscape, which contains both essays and short stories.

Indeed Roth did recreate, to an extent, the inspiration that resulted in his first novel. The first two volumes of the Mercy of a Rude Stream series (A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park and A Diving Rock on the Hudson), as largely autobiographical as Call it Sleep, received mixed reviews from critics surprised to discover its author was still alive. The series caused many readers to reread Sleep—or read it for the first time—and to write the author about the effect his work had on their lives. It also prompted old acquaintances from his Lower East Side days to write him and reminisce. Several of these letters exist in the correspondence series and serve as a touching monument to Roth’s legacy.

Henry Roth died October 13, 1995 at Lovelace Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at the age of 89. His wife Muriel preceded him in death in 1990. The Henry Roth Papers document the lifetime of one man, but as friend Ted Bookey cynically writes, "Like it or not, ‘enry, you are going to be a remembered episode in American and world literature. How interesting it will be to see your anonymity grow…. Imagine the crap, the falsifying, deluging crap, that’s going to be written about you by industrious Ph.D.’s [sic] and tender-loving critics;...think of the bull market for Roth’s discarded [sic] shoes and socks and the relics that will be sold. On a thousand typewriters the myths are raining."