Henry Roth
Encyclopedia
Henry Roth was an American novelist and short story
writer.
, near Ivano-Frankivsk
, Galicia, the Ukraine
). Although his parents never agreed on the exact date of his arrival in the United States, it is most likely that he landed at Ellis Island
and began his life in New York in 1908. He briefly lived in Brooklyn
, and then on the Lower East Side
, in the slums where his classic novel Call It Sleep
is set. In 1914, the family moved to Harlem
. 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
. With Walton’s support, he began Call It Sleep
in about 1930, and completed the novel in the spring of 1934, publishing in December 1934, to mixed reviews. In the 1960s, Roth's Call It Sleep underwent a critical reappraisal after being republished in 1964. With 1,000,000 copies sold, and many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the novel was hailed as an overlooked Depression
-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration. Today, it is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish American literature
.
After the book's publication, Roth began a second novel that was contracted with editor Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner’s. But Roth’s growing ideological frustration and personal confusion created a profound writer’s block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the earliest drafts of Mercy of a Rude Stream (although material written much earlier than 1979 was also incorporated into this later work). In 1938, during an unproductive sojourn at the artists’ colony Yaddo
in Saratoga Springs, New York
, Roth met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer; much of this period is depicted in Roth's final work, An American Type. Roth severed his relationship with Walton, moved out of her apartment, and married Parker in 1939, to the disapproval of her family. With the onset of World War II
, Roth became a tool and gauge maker. The couple moved first to Boston
with their two young sons, Jeremy and Hugh, and then in 1946 to Maine
. There Roth worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor.
Roth did not initially welcome the success of the 1964 reprint of Call It Sleep
, valuing his privacy instead. However, his writing block slowly began to break. In 1968, after Muriel’s retirement from the Maine state school system, the couple moved to a trailer home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, near where Roth had stayed as writer-in-residence at the D. H. Lawrence
ranch outside of Taos. Muriel began composing music again, while 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. After Muriel’s death in 1990, Roth moved into a ramshackle former funeral parlor and occupied himself with revising the final volumes of his monumental work, Mercy of a Rude Stream. It has been alleged that the incestuous relationships between the protagonist, a sister, and a cousin in Mercy of a Rude Stream are based on Roth's life. Roth's own sister denied that such events occurred.
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 sixty years. Roth attributed his massive writer's block to personal problems such as depression, and to political conflicts, including his disillusion with Communism. At other times he cited his early break with Judaism and his obsessive sexual preoccupations as probable causes. Roth died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States in 1995.
The character E. I. Lonoff in the Philip Roth
's Zuckerman novels is a composite of Roth, Bernard Malamud
and fictional elements.
The first volume, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park was published in 1994 by St. Martin’s Press and the second volume, called A Diving Rock on the Hudson, appeared from St. Martin’s in 1995. From Bondage, which appeared in hardcover in 1996, was the first volume of the four Mercy books to appear posthumously. Requiem for Harlem, the fourth and final volume, appeared in 1998. 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.
Before his death, Roth commented numerous times that Mercy of a Rude Stream comprised six volumes. In fact, Roth did write six separate books. He called the first four “Batch One,” and the last two, “Batch Two.” Roth's editor at St. Martin's, Robert Weil, along with Felicia Steele, Larry Fox, and Roth's agent, Roslyn Targ, found the epic would be best served in four volumes, as the four books of "Batch One" contained a stylistic and thematic unity inconsistent with the remaining two books.
Explaining the difference between Mercy of a Rude Stream and Call It Sleep
, critic Mario Materassi, Roth's longtime friend, argues that "Call It Sleep
can be read as a vehicle through which, soon after breaking away from his family and his tradition, young Roth used some of the fragments of his childhood to shore up the ruins of what he already felt was a disconnected self. Forty-five years later, Roth embarked on another attempt to bring some retrospective order to his life’s confusion: Mercy of a Rude Stream, which he has long called a ‘continuum,’ can be read as a final, monumental effort on the part of the elderly author to come to terms with the pattern of rupture and discontinuity that has marked his life”.
Both a love story and a lamentation, the novel opens in 1938, and reintroduces us to Ira Stigman of the Mercy cycle, a thirty-two-year-old “slum-born Yiddle” eager to assimilate but traumatized by his impoverished immigrant past. Restless with his lover and literary mentor, English professor Edith Welles, Ira journeys to Yaddo, where he meets M (who only appeared in the old man’s reveries in the Mercy series), a blond, aristocratic pianist whose “calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance” engages him.
The ensuing romantic crisis, as well as the conflict between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon his paramour’s Greenwich Village apartment and set out with an illiterate, boorish Communist on a quest for the promise of the American West. But feeling like a total failure in LA, Ira begins an epic journey home, thumbing rides from truckers and riding the rails with hobos through the Dust Bowl. Ira only knows that he must return to M, the woman he truly loves.
-era America
. He has also been hailed as a chronicler of New York city life.
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, Roth often fixates on human depravity in a multitude of forms. Sexually abhorrent acts such as incest, infidelity, and predation, for instance, inform much of his work. As does a more general climate of violence or abuse, oftentimes both inflicted on others and masochistically turned inwards.
Throughout his life, Roth simultaneously embraced and rejected the notion of a forgiving God, and this ambivalence is also registered in his writing. Mario Materassi suggests, in "Shifting Urbanscape: Roth's 'Private' New York" that Roth "has never been interested in any story other than the anguished one of a man who, throughout his life, has contradicted each of his previously held positions and beliefs."
While Roth's works are generally tragic, and oftentimes relentlessly so, his later work holds out for the possibility of redemption, or of mercy in a rude stream. This notion is especially evident in An American Type where the love between Ira and M becomes a means of transcendence.
and one from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. Posthumously, he was honored in 1995 with the Hadassah Harold Ribalow Lifetime Achievement Award and by the Museum of the City of New York
with Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger having named February 29, 1996, as “Henry Roth Day” in New York City. 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. In 2005, ten years after Roth’s death, the first full biography of his life, the prize-winning Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, by literary scholar Steven Kellman, was published, followed in 2006 by Henry Roth’s centenary, which was marked by a literary tribute at the New York Public Library
, sponsored by CCNY and organized by Lawrence I. Fox, Roth’s literary executor.
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
writer.
Biography
Roth was born in Tysmenitz near Stanislaviv, Galicia, Austro-Hungary (now known as TysmenytsiaTysmenytsia
Tysmenytsia is a city, the administrative center of the Tysmenytsia Raion in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast of western Ukraine. In 1900 as part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Tysmenytsia was in Tłumacz powiat.-Overview:...
, near Ivano-Frankivsk
Ivano-Frankivsk
Ivano-Frankivsk is a historic city located in the western Ukraine. It is the administrative centre of the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast , and is designated as its own separate raion within the oblast, municipality....
, Galicia, the Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
). Although his parents never agreed on the exact date of his arrival in the United States, it is most likely that he landed at Ellis Island
Ellis Island
Ellis Island in New York Harbor was the gateway for millions of immigrants to the United States. It was the nation's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954. The island was greatly expanded with landfill between 1892 and 1934. Before that, the much smaller original island was the...
and began his life in New York in 1908. He briefly lived in Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
, and then on the Lower East Side
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
, in the slums where his classic novel Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep is a 1934 novel by Henry Roth. The book centers on the experiences of a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century....
is set. In 1914, the family moved to Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...
. Roth lived there until 1927, when, as a senior at City College of New York
City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
, he moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
instructor who lived on Morton Street in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
. With Walton’s support, he began Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep is a 1934 novel by Henry Roth. The book centers on the experiences of a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century....
in about 1930, and completed the novel in the spring of 1934, publishing in December 1934, to mixed reviews. In the 1960s, Roth's Call It Sleep underwent a critical reappraisal after being republished in 1964. With 1,000,000 copies sold, and many weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, the novel was hailed as an overlooked Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
-era masterpiece and classic novel of immigration. Today, it is widely regarded as a masterpiece of Jewish American literature
Jewish American literature
Jewish American Literature holds an essential place in the literary history of the United States. It encompasses traditions of writing in English, primarily, as well as in other languages, the most important of which has been Yiddish...
.
After the book's publication, Roth began a second novel that was contracted with editor Maxwell Perkins, of Scribner’s. But Roth’s growing ideological frustration and personal confusion created a profound writer’s block, which lasted until 1979, when he began the earliest drafts of Mercy of a Rude Stream (although material written much earlier than 1979 was also incorporated into this later work). In 1938, during an unproductive sojourn at the artists’ colony Yaddo
Yaddo
Yaddo is an artists' community located on a 400 acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment."...
in Saratoga Springs, New York
Saratoga Springs, New York
Saratoga Springs, also known as simply Saratoga, is a city in Saratoga County, New York, United States. The population was 26,586 at the 2010 census. The name reflects the presence of mineral springs in the area. While the word "Saratoga" is known to be a corruption of a Native American name, ...
, Roth met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer; much of this period is depicted in Roth's final work, An American Type. Roth severed his relationship with Walton, moved out of her apartment, and married Parker in 1939, to the disapproval of her family. With the onset of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Roth became a tool and gauge maker. The couple moved first to Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
with their two young sons, Jeremy and Hugh, and then in 1946 to Maine
Maine
Maine is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south, New Hampshire to the west, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec to the northwest and New Brunswick to the northeast. Maine is both the northernmost and easternmost...
. There Roth worked as a woodsman, a schoolteacher, a psychiatric attendant in the state mental hospital, a waterfowl farmer, and a Latin and math tutor.
Roth did not initially welcome the success of the 1964 reprint of Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep is a 1934 novel by Henry Roth. The book centers on the experiences of a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century....
, valuing his privacy instead. However, his writing block slowly began to break. In 1968, after Muriel’s retirement from the Maine state school system, the couple moved to a trailer home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, near where Roth had stayed as writer-in-residence at the D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
ranch outside of Taos. Muriel began composing music again, while 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. After Muriel’s death in 1990, Roth moved into a ramshackle former funeral parlor and occupied himself with revising the final volumes of his monumental work, Mercy of a Rude Stream. It has been alleged that the incestuous relationships between the protagonist, a sister, and a cousin in Mercy of a Rude Stream are based on Roth's life. Roth's own sister denied that such events occurred.
Roth failed to garner the acclaim some say he deserves, perhaps because after the publication of Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep is a 1934 novel by Henry Roth. The book centers on the experiences of a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century....
he failed to produce another novel for sixty years. Roth attributed his massive writer's block to personal problems such as depression, and to political conflicts, including his disillusion with Communism. At other times he cited his early break with Judaism and his obsessive sexual preoccupations as probable causes. Roth died in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States in 1995.
The character E. I. Lonoff in the Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...
's Zuckerman novels is a composite of Roth, Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud
Bernard Malamud was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford...
and fictional elements.
Call It Sleep
Published in 1934, Call It Sleep centers on the experiences of a young boy, David Schearl, growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century.Mercy of a Rude Stream
Mercy of a Rude Stream is a monumental epic published in four volumes. It follows protagonist Ira Stigman from his family’s arrival in Jewish-Irish Harlem in 1914 to the night before Thanksgiving in 1927, when Ira decides to leave the family tenement and move in with Edith Welles. According to critic David Mehegan, Roth's Mercy represents a “landmark of the American literary century".The first volume, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park was published in 1994 by St. Martin’s Press and the second volume, called A Diving Rock on the Hudson, appeared from St. Martin’s in 1995. From Bondage, which appeared in hardcover in 1996, was the first volume of the four Mercy books to appear posthumously. Requiem for Harlem, the fourth and final volume, appeared in 1998. 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.
Before his death, Roth commented numerous times that Mercy of a Rude Stream comprised six volumes. In fact, Roth did write six separate books. He called the first four “Batch One,” and the last two, “Batch Two.” Roth's editor at St. Martin's, Robert Weil, along with Felicia Steele, Larry Fox, and Roth's agent, Roslyn Targ, found the epic would be best served in four volumes, as the four books of "Batch One" contained a stylistic and thematic unity inconsistent with the remaining two books.
Explaining the difference between Mercy of a Rude Stream and Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep is a 1934 novel by Henry Roth. The book centers on the experiences of a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century....
, critic Mario Materassi, Roth's longtime friend, argues that "Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep
Call It Sleep is a 1934 novel by Henry Roth. The book centers on the experiences of a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century....
can be read as a vehicle through which, soon after breaking away from his family and his tradition, young Roth used some of the fragments of his childhood to shore up the ruins of what he already felt was a disconnected self. Forty-five years later, Roth embarked on another attempt to bring some retrospective order to his life’s confusion: Mercy of a Rude Stream, which he has long called a ‘continuum,’ can be read as a final, monumental effort on the part of the elderly author to come to terms with the pattern of rupture and discontinuity that has marked his life”.
An American Type
Roth’s final novel, An American Type, emerged from “Batch 2,” which Roth wrote during the late 1980s and early 1990s. With his assistant’s help, Roth produced 1,900 typed pages of scenes beginning where Mercy left off and continuing through 1990. The manuscript of "Batch 2" remained untouched for over a decade until Weil sent it to The New Yorker, which published two excerpts from “Batch 2” in the summer of 2006 under the titles “God the Novelist” and “Freight." At The New Yorker the book came into the hands of Willing Davidson, then a young assistant in the magazine’s fiction department. At the suggestion of Weil and Roth’s literary executor, Lawrence Fox, Davidson edited “Batch 2” into An American Type, which was published by W.W. Norton in 2010.Both a love story and a lamentation, the novel opens in 1938, and reintroduces us to Ira Stigman of the Mercy cycle, a thirty-two-year-old “slum-born Yiddle” eager to assimilate but traumatized by his impoverished immigrant past. Restless with his lover and literary mentor, English professor Edith Welles, Ira journeys to Yaddo, where he meets M (who only appeared in the old man’s reveries in the Mercy series), a blond, aristocratic pianist whose “calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance” engages him.
The ensuing romantic crisis, as well as the conflict between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon his paramour’s Greenwich Village apartment and set out with an illiterate, boorish Communist on a quest for the promise of the American West. But feeling like a total failure in LA, Ira begins an epic journey home, thumbing rides from truckers and riding the rails with hobos through the Dust Bowl. Ira only knows that he must return to M, the woman he truly loves.
Themes
Henry Roth's writing centers on immigrant experience, particularly a Jewish-American experience in DepressionGreat Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
-era America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. He has also been hailed as a chronicler of New York city life.
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, Roth often fixates on human depravity in a multitude of forms. Sexually abhorrent acts such as incest, infidelity, and predation, for instance, inform much of his work. As does a more general climate of violence or abuse, oftentimes both inflicted on others and masochistically turned inwards.
Throughout his life, Roth simultaneously embraced and rejected the notion of a forgiving God, and this ambivalence is also registered in his writing. Mario Materassi suggests, in "Shifting Urbanscape: Roth's 'Private' New York" that Roth "has never been interested in any story other than the anguished one of a man who, throughout his life, has contradicted each of his previously held positions and beliefs."
While Roth's works are generally tragic, and oftentimes relentlessly so, his later work holds out for the possibility of redemption, or of mercy in a rude stream. This notion is especially evident in An American Type where the love between Ira and M becomes a means of transcendence.
Awards and honors
While still alive, Roth received two honorary doctorates, one from the University of New MexicoUniversity of New Mexico
The University of New Mexico at Albuquerque is a public research university located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States. It is the state's flagship research institution...
and one from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. Posthumously, he was honored in 1995 with the Hadassah Harold Ribalow Lifetime Achievement Award and by the Museum of the City of New York
Museum of the City of New York
The Museum of the City of New York is an art gallery and history museum founded in 1923 to present the history of New York City, USA and its people...
with Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger having named February 29, 1996, as “Henry Roth Day” in New York City. From Bondage was cited by the National Book Critics Circle
National Book Critics Circle
The National Book Critics Circle is an American tax-exempt organization for active book reviewers. Its flagship is the National Book Critics Circle Award....
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. In 2005, ten years after Roth’s death, the first full biography of his life, the prize-winning Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, by literary scholar Steven Kellman, was published, followed in 2006 by Henry Roth’s centenary, which was marked by a literary tribute at the New York Public Library
New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is the largest public library in North America and is one of the United States' most significant research libraries...
, sponsored by CCNY and organized by Lawrence I. Fox, Roth’s literary executor.
External links
- "Breathing Life Into Henry Roth" by Charles McGrath, The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, May 23, 2010 - "An American Type" by Henry Roth, edited by Willing Davidson, excerpted in The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, May 23, 2010 - "Henry Roth Author Page"
- "Writer, Interrupted: The Resurrection of Henry Roth" by Jonathan Rosen, from The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
- "Freight", short story in the September 25, 2006 issue of The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
- "God the Novelist", short story in the May 29, 2006 issue of The New YorkerThe New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
- "The Last Minstrel" Daniel Mendelsohn on Roth (audio recording)
- "Henry Roth's obituary", in The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
by Richard E. Nicholls - "Ending a 60-Year Silence", in Time Magazine by Paul Gray
- "Henry Roth Bio: Life as a Self-Loathing, Sister-Loving Genius", in Bloomberg News by Jeffrey Tannenbaum
- "Free at Last", in The Boston GlobeThe Boston GlobeThe Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
by David Mehegan - "The Rediscovery of a Great Novelist", in The Canadian Jewish Chronicle by Harold U. Ribalow
- "Memory Unbound", by Morris Dickstein in "The Three Penny Review"