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"Henry Roth's Neglected Masterpiece"
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Abstract –
After the publication in 1935 of his first and only novel, Call It Sleep, HENRY ROTH retired completely from the literary scene until last year when his parable, "At Times in Flight," appeared in COMMENTARY (July 1959). Asked to write a memoir of his years as a poultry farmer in Augusta, Maine, Mr. Roth produced another parable, "The Dun Dakotas," which we publish here along with LESLIE A. FIEDLER'S revaluation of Call It Sleep. Mr. Fiedler is the author of An End to Innocence and Love and Death in the American Novel. A new edition of Call It Sleep will be issued in the fall by the Pageant Book Co.
IT WOULD not be quite true to say that Henry Roth's Call It Sleep went unnoticed when it appeared in 1935. One contemporary reviewer at least was willing to call it "a great novel" and to hope that it might win the Pulitzer Prize, "which," that reviewer added mournfully, "it never will." It never did, the prize going instead to H. L. Davis's Honey in the Horn, which was also the Harper Prize Novel of the year and was even touted by Robert Penn Warren in the Southern Review-then still being subsidized by Huey Long. Not only the Southern Agrarians were looking elsewhere, however, when Roth's single book was published; almost everyone seemed to have his eye on his own preferred horizon, on which he was pretending to find his own preferred rising star.
© 2009 Commentary Inc.
