Call It Sleep
By Henry Roth; Alfred Kazin (Introduction by); Hana Wirth-Nesher (Afterword by)
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Paperback, 9780374522926, 448pp.)
Publication Date: January 1992
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback
Categories: Literary
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When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with 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 the novel receive the recognition it deserves. Call It Sleep was the first paperback ever to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and it proceeded to sell millions of copies both in the United States and around the world.
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 Mercy of a Rude Stream.
"Arguably the most distinguished work of fiction ever written about immigrant life."--Lis Harris, The New Yorker
"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 (front page)
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