Call It Sleep A Novel

When Henry Roth published his debut novel Call It Sleep in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim though, in those troubled times, lackluster sales. Only with its paperback publication thirty years later did this novel receive the recognition it deserves--and still enjoys. Having sold-to-date millions of copies worldwide,Call It Sleepis the magnificent story of David Schearl, the "dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York. Henry Roth(1906-1995) was born in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galitzia. He probably landed on Ellis Island in 1909 and began his life in New York on the Lower East Side, in the slums whereCall It Sleepis set. He is the author as well ofShifting Landscapes, a collection of essays, andMercy of a Rude Stream. When Henry Roth publishedCall It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did this novel receive the recognition it deserves--and still enjoys. Call It Sleep, the story of David Schearl, the "dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York, is a novel of Jewish life full of the pain and honesty of family relationships. It holds the distinction of being the first paperback ever to receive a front-page review inThe New York Times Book Review, and it proceeded to sell millions of copies both in the United States and around the world. This edition includes an Introduction by Alfred Kazin and an Afterword by Hana Wirth-Nesher. "One of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a twentieth-century American. The central figure is David Schearl, an overwrought, phobic, and dangerously imaginative little boy. He has come to New York with his East European Jewish parents, and now, in the years between 1911 and 1913, he is exposed, shock by shock, to the blows of slum life."--Irving Howe,The New York Times Book Review "An epic ambition that was immediately recognized . . . a classic articulation of the American immigrant experience."--The New York Times Book Review "Roth has done for the East Side Jew what James. T. Farrell is doing for the Chicago Irish in the Studs Lonigan trilogy . . . When his characters are speaking pure Yiddish, Roth translates it into great beauty . . . The final chapters in the book have been compared to the Nighttown episodes of Joyce'sUlysses; the comparison is apt."--John Chamberlain,The New York Times "Roth's masterpiece,Call It Sleep, was heralded by our finest critics (Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, for example) as the greatest novel of the immigrant experience; its use of language was deemed a worthy rival to James Joyce'sA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."--The New York Sun "Arguably the most distinguished work of fiction ever written about immigrant life . . . Surely the most lyrically authentic novel in American literature about a young boy's coming to consciousness . . . Roth's writing--not unlike Colette's, where politics has been rendered irrelevant by an almost transcendent physicality--is rebellious, wayward, and sensually attuned to the tumultuous depths of a child's world."--Lis Harris,The New Yorker "In 1934, Henry Roth publishedCall It Sleep, an autobiographical novel about immigrant Jewish life in the

Henry Roth (1906-1995) was born in the Austro- Hungarian province of Galitzia. He probably landed on Ellis Island in 1909 and began his life in New York on the Lower East Side, in the slums where Call It Sleep is set. He is the author as well of Shifting Landscapes, a collection of essays, and the Mercy of a Rude Stream tetralogy.